Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
Speaker 2: that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
Speaker 2: facts and figures behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows
Speaker 2: and more. I'm not even gonna come up with the
Speaker 2: old name pun intro things, because we're making up for
Speaker 2: lost time on this one, and it's my fault. I'm
Speaker 2: Alex Heigel and I'm Jordan run Talk and Jordan. Today
Speaker 2: we're talking about one of the weirdest success stories of
Speaker 2: the turn of the millennium, of findesecla Arts, a show that,
Speaker 2: on its face, had little to differentiate itself from fellow
Speaker 2: industry heavies like South Park or The Simpsons, but one
Speaker 2: that nevertheless garnered a rabid fan base during its short
Speaker 2: initial run and has mushroomed into a shared universe of
Speaker 2: properties and a widely memed Internet presence. That's right, we're
Speaker 2: talking about family guy. Jordan wan On, you take you
Speaker 2: give me your thoughts on fit because I pitched this.
Speaker 1: I'm thrilled you did. This is a rare instance of
Speaker 1: something from our youth that I actually actively engaged in
Speaker 1: regular Okay, oh no, this was huge for me, if
Speaker 1: you were in middle school or high school during this
Speaker 1: show's run, Family Guy became like a second language with
Speaker 1: your friends, like more so than Austin Powers, more so
Speaker 1: than Anchorman. Is just endlessly quotable. And I'm really having
Speaker 1: a hard time thinking of another TV show that had
Speaker 1: that kind of impact on my social group at that age.
Speaker 1: And I think a huge part of it was the
Speaker 1: DVD release, which I know we'll talk about that great
Speaker 1: length later. Yes, to my mind, it was the first
Speaker 1: TV show that became a mega hit on home video.
Speaker 1: In fact, I don't think I ever really watched it live, did.
Speaker 2: You no, Because well for the first like maybe the
Speaker 2: first three episode.
Speaker 1: Yeah, actually I think I watched the premiere ya.
Speaker 2: And then part of like Fox's Deep Free like made
Speaker 2: it impossible to watch, and then it was just suddenly gone.
Speaker 2: And then I think I caught it on Cartoon Network
Speaker 2: one night. But I remember being so struck by it
Speaker 2: that I was like downloading Family Guy bits from like
Speaker 2: Khazah and LimeWire to have the memorize Oh same.
Speaker 1: I mean these DVDs, though, like they were ubiquitous in
Speaker 1: a way that I feel like TV show comps never
Speaker 1: had been before. I mean a lot of it. I know,
Speaker 1: it was like a convenience thing because prior to this,
Speaker 1: I tried to watch a lot of my beloved British
Speaker 1: comedies like Faulty Towers or Monty pytheon were absolutely fabulous
Speaker 1: years earlier, and they were because they weren't being broadcast
Speaker 1: in the United States and I could only get them
Speaker 1: on VHS, which had like at most three episodes per tape,
Speaker 1: and they were big and clunky and expensive and really
Speaker 1: hard to navigate because you just had to fast forward
Speaker 1: until you found the episode you wanted to get to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was not very user friendly, and so I just
Speaker 1: remember having my mind blown that you could have an
Speaker 1: entire season of a show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like it was crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was nuts.
Speaker 2: I think pretty much right around the time that DVD
Speaker 2: was really becoming a boom industry too, so like it
Speaker 2: had not taken over from I mean I so my
Speaker 2: benchmark is always like, I think The Matrix was the
Speaker 2: last movie I owned on VHS.
Speaker 1: Ah, okay, so that'll be ninety nine, So yeah that
Speaker 1: sounds about right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, well ninety nine or two thousand by the
Speaker 2: time it made it to home media. But yeah, like
Speaker 2: so for this to come out and then go out
Speaker 2: onto DVD was like the next big step. And yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean my mom, bless her got me these, like
Speaker 2: she just knew that I liked the show and just
Speaker 2: got me the box season of these for like six
Speaker 2: seasons straight.
Speaker 1: This was like like if our parents' generation everybody's house
Speaker 1: had like Rumors or something or like Asia or like
Speaker 1: like everybody's house had Family Guy box sets.
Speaker 2: Well it was dorm rooms honestly for me, because it
Speaker 2: was like when you look at the like so when
Speaker 2: this I mean, we'll get to it later, but this
Speaker 2: thing was behind the Simpsons and behind Chappelle's show, and
Speaker 2: that pretty much defines fourteen to twenty four year old
Speaker 2: guys humor for ten straight years of the culture, you know.
Speaker 1: And I think that's why it was so quota. In fact,
Speaker 1: I know that was why it was so quotable because
Speaker 1: it was the first TV show that you would just
Speaker 1: I mean it kind of birthed comfort watching in a
Speaker 1: way because I would watch these episodes over and over
Speaker 1: and over again and do full scenes with my friends
Speaker 1: just in the hallway at school. Yeah, for me, it
Speaker 1: was more of a high school thing rather than a
Speaker 1: college thing.
Speaker 2: No, No, I mean it was it was. It was
Speaker 2: all through that. But then I brought them with me
Speaker 2: to college. Yeah, so they would just I had like
Speaker 2: six yeah, I mean like had six seasons of family guys.
Speaker 2: It would just like which what are we thrown in
Speaker 2: the PS two to like crash out on the couch
Speaker 2: for Yeah, And I was already a Simpsons fan. South
Speaker 2: Park hauld hit but like, I don't know, man what,
Speaker 2: we can talk about this later, but South Park has
Speaker 2: never really done it for me. But I was deep
Speaker 2: into Simpsons at that point, and so I was too.
Speaker 2: This one just hit me as like it's like meaner
Speaker 2: than the Simpsons and has kind of the same rate
Speaker 2: of pop culture stuff and like cut way gags and everything.
Speaker 2: But I also feel like, you know, this show in
Speaker 2: its prime tapped like a very actual surrealistic, absurdist streak
Speaker 2: that the Simpsons never never did. Oh yeah, the Simpsons
Speaker 2: was like essentially the Honeymooners. Then this was like my Python, Yeah,
Speaker 2: which is something that like didn't it didn't. It didn't
Speaker 2: conform to any of the acceptable rules, and there were
Speaker 2: just all kinds of weird throw twos and subplots and
Speaker 2: it just yeah, I mean it just hit me. I
Speaker 2: definitely have not kept up with it. Yeah, no, no,
Speaker 2: which is why it's so bizarre that you know, it's
Speaker 2: been taken over by zoomers on TikTok over the past
Speaker 2: three years, which.
Speaker 1: Is just I missed this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm excited to explain it to you, pal
Speaker 2: oh good and all of our listeners.
Speaker 1: No, I was the same way with you. I was
Speaker 1: a Simpsons guy, and then I saw advertisements for this
Speaker 1: also on Fox, probably while watching The Simpsons.
Speaker 2: And it's funny.
Speaker 1: I remember at first thinking that Peter Griffin was just
Speaker 1: like overweight Bill Gates, Like I really thought like some
Speaker 1: kind of like parody or something which just really sets
Speaker 1: it shows the sign of the times, if you will.
Speaker 1: It would have been like what like late ninety eight.
Speaker 1: And yeah, soon as I started watching Family Guys like
Speaker 1: you couldn't go back to the Simpsons. It just to
Speaker 1: me it felt like this was so much more potent.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the perfect show for like teenagers who
Speaker 1: are just starting to have their attention span routed by
Speaker 1: the Internet, you know what I mean, Like this oh
Speaker 1: ninety nine, like we were thirteen or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and man, I you know, I don't want to
Speaker 2: give him credit for this, but like this show honestly
Speaker 2: was one of the first kind of early precursors of
Speaker 2: what entertainment would be today. Yeah, or like the screen
Speaker 2: experience today where it's like it's gonna move really fast,
Speaker 2: there's gonna be a bunch of things that you miss.
Speaker 2: It's because it's just overstimulating you from every angle. And
Speaker 2: that's I think there's like a certain poetry that it's
Speaker 2: become so TikTok as part of like Generation Z and
Speaker 2: A and like the most generations for attention span and
Speaker 2: dopamine and all that literacy, basic social uh, you know
Speaker 2: niceties I have. I mean, I work in education and
Speaker 2: so does my sister, and trust me, you all want
Speaker 2: to die before Generation Alpha takes over, and probably most
Speaker 2: of Gen Z respectfully. But yeah, it's interesting. I just
Speaker 2: think it anticipated this, Like the way things work now
Speaker 2: is so the flow of non sequitars that parade our
Speaker 2: everyday life.
Speaker 1: Everybody knew that it was always a guy. It was
Speaker 1: a guy in high school. Everybody knew that guy in
Speaker 1: high school who everybody thought was hilarious. But then all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you just realize one day wait a minute,
Speaker 1: you're just random, You're not funny?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what I mean?
Speaker 1: Like that, Yeah, that's a common knock against the show.
Speaker 1: That's what show writers from like the Simpsons in South
Speaker 1: Park kind of accuse family guy of being.
Speaker 2: But it's so funny because all those guys were like
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know about the King of the
Speaker 2: Hill writers room, but they were definitely like Harvard people
Speaker 2: in the in the Simpsons writing room, And like, did
Speaker 2: those guys not know about Dada? Did they do not
Speaker 2: know about surrealism? Were they like not able to I
Speaker 2: mean I think that, like I's very generous, well, but
Speaker 2: they would. I mean, the Dadas were scatological quite a
Speaker 2: lot too. They considered nothing like there's there's you know,
Speaker 2: toilets as a significant part of Dada and surrealistic artist douchamp.
Speaker 1: Also, that's an incredible pairing, and I applaud.
Speaker 2: You for it, okay, And like it's obviously cringeness, it
Speaker 2: like navigated its cringiness just by powering through. Yeah, Like
Speaker 2: there was a point at which you would just like
Speaker 2: I don't know, like if you like saw someone wandering
Speaker 2: around your college dorm in like an oversized hoodie and
Speaker 2: Family Guy pajama pants. You would be like avoid that person.
Speaker 2: Oh that was just most you people.
Speaker 1: That wasn't me. Yeah no, I had crushed velve at
Speaker 1: pants in college, of course. Yeah no, I that to me,
Speaker 1: that was just everything. I was in a dorm where
Speaker 1: everybody was in the dorm was really in the television
Speaker 1: like that was they put all the like wanna be
Speaker 1: TV writers into one dorm. That was like the theme
Speaker 1: of my floor of my dorm, which in retrospect, I
Speaker 1: can't believe I meant it out alive. But yeah, no,
Speaker 1: that was just kind of everybody in my dorm.
Speaker 2: Okay, good to know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I kind of just stopped watching The Simpsons
Speaker 1: after I got into Family Guy. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if it was just because the Family Guy just kind
Speaker 1: of took over for me, or looking back on it,
Speaker 1: it almost seems like Family Guys started to ascend right
Speaker 1: when The Simpsons started its long, slow decline. But I
Speaker 1: know you're much more of a Simpson's head than I am,
Speaker 1: so imagine you have thoughts on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's hard to pin exactly when it
Speaker 2: started declining. I think there were still some good episodes
Speaker 2: every now and again around that time, but I'm more
Speaker 2: interested in your perception of it versus south Park. South Park.
Speaker 1: I South Park got a weird relationship with because I
Speaker 1: remember being in fourth grade, I want to say, And
Speaker 1: I remember my I was in bed about to go
Speaker 1: to sleep, and my dad came whirling in, and my
Speaker 1: dad didn't get excited about a lot of things, and
Speaker 1: I just remember him being like, you will never guess
Speaker 1: what I just saw on this crazy TV show And
Speaker 1: it was the Mister Hanky Christmas Special and he couldn't believe,
Speaker 1: Like I have to imagine, judging from his reaction that
Speaker 1: it was on par was seeing the Beatles on Sullivan
Speaker 1: Like it was just so like I really, he like
Speaker 1: shook me awake to tell me about this, but then
Speaker 1: he refused to let me see South Park because it
Speaker 1: was too cool for me. I have no idea. I
Speaker 1: think it was like the only restriction he ever put
Speaker 1: on any viewing for me ever my entire childhood.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Same, but I don't like, I mean, I still
Speaker 2: put like this. Obviously, South Park is great. The Scott
Speaker 2: Tenorant episode is one of the perfect episodes of television
Speaker 2: of all time. Yes, yes, but I just couldn't fathom
Speaker 2: why South Park Guy. Like, I can understand that like
Speaker 2: a bunch of Ivy League like joke crafters in the
Speaker 2: Simpsons room hated Family Guy, but like, where did the
Speaker 2: South Park guys get off?
Speaker 1: Well, Okay, I think it's I mean, because it's Matt
Speaker 1: Stone and Trade Park. It's just the two of them,
Speaker 1: So I think they probably feel like it's these two
Speaker 1: scrappy upstarts competing against the whole writer's room who are
Speaker 1: making a boziz. I mean, I think Matt Stone and
Speaker 1: Trey Parker even said like, yeah, they made a hell
Speaker 1: of a lot more money Family Guy, whan we ever
Speaker 1: did U. So I think they felt like it was
Speaker 1: an unfair fight. And also, I mean, I hate to
Speaker 1: say it like this, but like as a screenwriting major,
Speaker 1: I will say I think that the plots of South
Speaker 1: Park are much more ingenious. The humor is rooted in
Speaker 1: not just the characters, but just the actual scenarios. And
Speaker 1: I think that Family Guy does lean on the non sequiturs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's a huge crutch that carries you through both
Speaker 1: in terms of number of laughs per episode, and it
Speaker 1: was just eating up time. I mean, if you have
Speaker 1: if a given Family Guy episode has I'm making this
Speaker 1: up at eight minutes per non sequit or out of
Speaker 1: a twenty four minute episode or twenty one minute Sure,
Speaker 1: it's just less staff to craft.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean, I'll admit.
Speaker 1: I think South Park smarter.
Speaker 2: I don't know about that. I do think like the
Speaker 2: cutaways when I heard them explained as I think in
Speaker 2: Seth Macfarland's terms, like as essentially writing a far side
Speaker 2: comic strip, Oh wow, okay, like and just having this
Speaker 2: idea of like how are we going to pitch like
Speaker 2: some random absurd image or some like insane ten sections
Speaker 2: of action that like can be communicated in an instant
Speaker 2: like this and keep the pace of the show. I
Speaker 2: think that's a very valid writing and exercise. I don't
Speaker 2: think it certainly more than those idiots like farting around
Speaker 2: in a room, you know, talking about like oh what
Speaker 2: if Cartman had to poop? Like, come on, man, don't
Speaker 2: give them credit as writers. You know you've seen eight
Speaker 2: Days to Air that like the first like four days
Speaker 2: of that show is them just like sitting around in
Speaker 2: a room increasingly panicked as they don't have ideas, and
Speaker 2: then they just I mean, yeah, man, but like I
Speaker 2: promise you, yeah, but I just don't think. I mean, yes,
Speaker 2: of course, but no, I don't know. I I think
Speaker 2: I came to understand the Family Guy, the cutaway bits
Speaker 2: and their their target of humor or like their specific
Speaker 2: I came to respect that more than I did when
Speaker 2: I was listening to people tell me how stupid it
Speaker 2: was whenever they did that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's very effective, I will say, I mean,
Speaker 1: and just the ingenuity of a many I do admire
Speaker 1: how Family Guy breaks the pain threshold with like long gags.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like Peter fighting Ernie the giant Chicken for
Speaker 1: like eight minutes or whatever the hell that was, Like
Speaker 1: that's incredible, Like I admire those swings.
Speaker 2: But that's what I get back to saying that there's
Speaker 2: a degree of good writing in there is because it
Speaker 2: initially started so small.
Speaker 1: That's guts. That's not good riding, that's guts.
Speaker 2: Okay, it's guts, and its foresight to be like have
Speaker 2: this like seeded thing where it's like, first it's just
Speaker 2: like that chicken, pass me a bad cubon. So we
Speaker 2: have like ten seconds of like a fight, and then
Speaker 2: it gets occasionally referenced until it builds up to like
Speaker 2: a full you know, they live fight in the alley scene,
Speaker 2: so like which I also would be risky nuties if
Speaker 2: I didn't tell you that south Park straight up copied
Speaker 2: that entire scene for an episode, so they referenced it
Speaker 2: in the.
Speaker 1: Same way the Family Guy referenced it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean, we'll get into the south Park
Speaker 2: episode later anyway. Obviously, because the show is nearing four
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty episodes, multiple spin offs, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 2: we are covering the launch of the show to its
Speaker 2: initial cancelation and return, and then we're gonna wrap it
Speaker 2: up with some of the meme culture stuff and some
Speaker 2: of the controversies. So for anyone that expects us to
Speaker 2: be a deep dive into the entirety of aired Family Guy,
Speaker 2: turn off now and don't give me a one star rating.
Speaker 2: So from the incredible luck that propelled creator Seth MacFarlane
Speaker 2: straight out of art school to the world of animation
Speaker 2: and then, in short order, his own show, to how
Speaker 2: much the show's other adult animation peers hated them, to
Speaker 2: controversial episodes that never aired, to the absolutely brain rotting
Speaker 2: second life of the show. On today's social media. Here's
Speaker 2: everything you didn't know about Family Guy. Did your high
Speaker 2: school jazz band do a version of that song?
Speaker 1: What's on Family Guy?
Speaker 2: Yeah? No, Oh, we were not cool enough for that.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. I had to hear that so much
Speaker 2: when I was in the high school jazz band circuit.
Speaker 1: WHOA what'd you play it in jazz band space pace?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Anyway, Family Guy was created by a gentleman named
Speaker 2: Seth MacFarlane, who, as anyone knows by now, is super
Speaker 2: into forties and fifties music and road movies and also
Speaker 2: TV from the late seventies into the eighties and show
Speaker 2: tunes and show tunes. Yeah, he's like a half boomer,
Speaker 2: half Generation.
Speaker 1: X, which is kind of why I feel like we'd
Speaker 1: be friends.
Speaker 2: Yeah that tracks. H McFarlan was born in Connecticut in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy three and was apparently drawing by the age
Speaker 2: of two. By five, he knew he wanted to be
Speaker 2: an animator, but unfortunately, as he said on Inside the
Speaker 2: Actors Studio, there was no information at the time. I
Speaker 2: think my parents found one book on animation that they
Speaker 2: scrounged up for me, and they got it from a library,
Speaker 2: you know. Two Towns. Over Four years later, at the
Speaker 2: age of nine, young McFarlane was publishing a weekly comic
Speaker 2: strip called Walter Cruton that appeared in his local newspaper,
Speaker 2: for which he was paid five dollars a week.
Speaker 1: Now, okay, I'm sorry. Even for a nine year old
Speaker 1: in the eighties, that rate seems criminal.
Speaker 2: Five bucks. I don't know, man, times were different. You know,
Speaker 2: crack was cheaper.
Speaker 1: Walter Krutze. Is that a Walter Cronkite reference or just probably? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, like, I don't know, I just I know we.
Speaker 1: Talked about this a little bit offline, but just get
Speaker 1: this out of the way. Seth MacFarland. Is he like
Speaker 1: some kind of can we say savant? Like he's definitely
Speaker 1: like a very unusual talent, and not just from his influences,
Speaker 1: like he was doing this at nine years old, Like
Speaker 1: that's that's unusual.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's like a single purpose to him that seems
Speaker 2: weird when you consider how like lazy he's actually gotten
Speaker 2: in not writing or working on like any of these
Speaker 2: shows anymore and just showing up to do voiceover work.
Speaker 1: He's worth three hundred million dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's that too. Anyway, McFarland's eventual taste for courting
Speaker 2: controversy showed up early A strip of the character kneeling
Speaker 2: at the altar for communion and asking the priest can
Speaker 2: I have fries with That earned him an angry letter
Speaker 2: from a local priest.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's literally a Family Guy joke. I
Speaker 1: swear I could hear Peter saying that.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In eighth grade, he made an animated film that
Speaker 2: was very, very crude. In his words, you explained to
Speaker 2: a IgM that I had a sense of exactly what
Speaker 2: it was I wanted to do, but it was just
Speaker 2: kind of tough. Even at the time, which was not
Speaker 2: that long ago, no one was really able to tell
Speaker 2: me how animation worked. Funny note about McFarland's early life.
Speaker 2: He attended the Kent School, which was a Connecticut private
Speaker 2: school where both his parents worked, and he said the
Speaker 2: only reason he really went there is because they got
Speaker 2: free tuition for him. But in nineteen ninety nine, the
Speaker 2: Reverend Richardson W. Schnell Shell pardon me, then headmaster of
Speaker 2: the Kent School, called Family Guy obnoxious and asked major
Speaker 2: companies not to advertise on it, and subsequently McFarlane's parents
Speaker 2: who were still working there in nineteen ninety nine resigned.
Speaker 2: So I was like, man, that's love for your kid.
Speaker 2: It's also like a weird.
Speaker 1: Hill for the headmaster to to die on, like I've
Speaker 1: never like it. Must have been pointed like did he
Speaker 1: have it out for the McFarlands, Like that's a weird thing.
Speaker 2: Now. I feel like somebody was just like, check out
Speaker 2: what one of our alumni is doing. And he was like,
Speaker 2: oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: I said this in the Dead Poet Society episode. These
Speaker 1: schools are evil. Take it from me. Prep school dropout.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, As McFarlane explained to Terry Gross on an
Speaker 2: episode of Fresh Air in twenty eleven, a big early
Speaker 2: influence on him was the Muppets, and in particular their music.
Speaker 2: For me, the Muppets were more legit than anybody in
Speaker 2: that regard, he said. The Muppets and even Sesame Street.
Speaker 2: Joe Roposo, the great jazz composer, wrote so many great
Speaker 2: songs for Sesame Street and the Muppets. Sinatra recorded Being Green,
Speaker 2: Bing Crosby recorded Sing The Great Muppet Caper. Every song
Speaker 2: in that movie is a great Joe Roposo song.
Speaker 1: I can't believe he's not shouting out Paul Williams Holmes
Speaker 1: is incredibly rainbow connection them Street, I.
Speaker 2: Mean surely others. Well, therein lies the rub. McFarlane, as
Speaker 2: most people know, loves mid century great American songbook crunersh
Speaker 2: he sings on the show. He studied with Frank Sinatra's
Speaker 2: old vocal teachers. He put out his own records and
Speaker 2: toured with like big bands and cocktail shows. At one point,
Speaker 2: when he was at Risdye, the Rhode Island School of
Speaker 2: Design where he went to college, he thought about going
Speaker 2: to Boston Conservatory to study musical theater, which talk about
Speaker 2: two roads diverged in a wood. I think he would
Speaker 2: have become like the evil Bizarro Lin Manuel Miranda had
Speaker 2: he been, had he become a musical theater dork, Yeah, wow,
Speaker 2: what a horrifying thought.
Speaker 1: Yes, quite, or he would have written, like you know,
Speaker 1: if the South Park guys did Book of Mormon, and
Speaker 1: I can imagine Seth macfarlan would have probably done something.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The so called Disney Renaissance, which we talked a lot
Speaker 1: about on this show, the incredible string from what eighty
Speaker 1: seven to ninety five is generally it's it's the era
Speaker 1: of that Little Mermaid Duty and the Beast, et cetera.
Speaker 2: I guess it really depends on when your cut off
Speaker 2: or when they stop being good. Is yeah, Hercules has
Speaker 2: shooters out there.
Speaker 1: I like Hercules, is okay. I think Mulom was like
Speaker 1: the last good one in my memory. I remember thinking
Speaker 1: that the one without all fulfilled Colin song Tarzan. I
Speaker 1: remember thinking Tarzan was like, oh I don't like this
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I think like when I was, I think
Speaker 2: like Hunchback of oshra Dam was another one where I
Speaker 2: was like, this isn't good. Yeah. Yeah, although that one
Speaker 2: I shooters too. I will say it's just because everyone
Speaker 2: loves the priests like Horny Fire and Brimstone Song.
Speaker 1: Anyway, the so called Disney Renaissance was primed to make
Speaker 1: a huge impact on young on Master McFarlane, I feel
Speaker 1: like he would have been the can of kid that
Speaker 1: would get off on being called Master McFarlane.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, probably, yeah. Takes one to know one.
Speaker 1: He enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design. He said,
Speaker 1: I suppose I decided there that big bulbous eyes were important.
Speaker 2: If that's the some takeaway of his education.
Speaker 1: And He studied there with the intention of becoming an
Speaker 1: animator for Disney. Then here comes the Simpsons. He told
Speaker 1: MPR who said, hey, you could also do this. We're
Speaker 1: rewriting the rule book with regard to what you can
Speaker 1: do on television, and I was laughing. This was something
Speaker 1: that actually was for me. In college, McFarlane did stand
Speaker 1: up comedy, which I can't imagine that went well, especially
Speaker 1: seeing well Oscar.
Speaker 2: He's not doing it now. Yeah, when you're insanely rich
Speaker 2: and can virtually pay your way out of any debacle
Speaker 2: and you still don't return to something you flopped at
Speaker 2: in college, Okay, that's how you know you really sucked
Speaker 2: at it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so he did stand up. He appeared in student films.
Speaker 1: He created a thesis called The Life of Larry, which
Speaker 1: was basically a dry run for Family Guy, A thesis film.
Speaker 2: What did I say, just a thesis.
Speaker 1: A thesis film. I definitely think it was included as
Speaker 1: like a bonus feature on one of the Family Guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah they're out there.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've definitely seen it hilariously. At least one of
Speaker 1: his professors at Risdy tried to deter seth MacFarland from
Speaker 1: honing in on comedy. He told The New York Times
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four. I just wanted to make
Speaker 1: people laugh, and I remember taking a lot of guff
Speaker 1: from my professors about that. I showed my storyboard my
Speaker 1: film professor, and she said, I'm really worried that you're
Speaker 1: wasting your time on what's essentially a lot of bathroom humor.
Speaker 1: She said, this is the one chance to make the
Speaker 1: personal film that you really want to make, and I said,
Speaker 1: this is it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man.
Speaker 1: One of Seth McFarland's professors submitted his thesis, the one
Speaker 1: that one of the other professors thought he was wasting
Speaker 1: his time on. Somebody else apparently at the school thought
Speaker 1: it was great and submitted it to Hannah Barbara without
Speaker 1: McFarland's knowledge, which is crazy. There was a competition Hannah
Speaker 1: Barbara was having and McFarlane's thesis film The Life of
Speaker 1: Larry won, and subsequently, in nineteen ninety five, McFarlane moved
Speaker 1: to Los Angeles to work for the Legendary Animation Studio,
Speaker 1: contributing the series Like Dexter's Laboratory, Cowan Chicken and.
Speaker 2: Johnny Bravo Forgot about Cowen Chicken Isn't that kind of
Speaker 2: sweet that like a professor randomly picked. I mean, I
Speaker 2: think part of the program was that people had to
Speaker 2: be selected, but just the idea that someone was like,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna I'm gonna do this for you and I'm
Speaker 2: also not going to tell you. You know, that's kind of sweet.
Speaker 1: I like that.
Speaker 2: I would have enjoyed that support at any point in
Speaker 2: my life. But you know, so what are we talking about.
Speaker 1: Interestingly, it wasn't McFarland's animation Chops that got him his
Speaker 1: job at Hanna Barbara. As he explained to IGN, I
Speaker 1: was actually one of the few people who got hired
Speaker 1: into that program primarily because of writing. This is what
Speaker 1: they told me after the fact. Certainly, my student film
Speaker 1: was not the drawings were not anything special. They were
Speaker 1: pretty crude looking. But you know, it was the content,
Speaker 1: the jokes themselves, that were the reason they hired me.
Speaker 1: And while out West, McFarlane also freelanced for Disney for
Speaker 1: a time. It is beloved Disney, working on Jungle Cubs,
Speaker 1: which I have no memory of, and ace Ventchara, the
Speaker 1: animated series, which I deemly recall.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a dim memory of that. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 2: you know, One of the things that I do like
Speaker 2: about him that this show made me respect more is
Speaker 2: like he kept bringing in people from the kind of
Speaker 2: animation community. Like there's a lot of people on this
Speaker 2: show who he worked with at Cartoon Network and other places.
Speaker 2: So you know, it's a family business. Come on, make
Speaker 2: it a family guy. While working in While working in
Speaker 2: Hannah Barbera in nineteen ninety six, McFarland created a sequel
Speaker 2: to the Life of Larry called Larry and Steve, which
Speaker 2: featured the bumbling, middle aged Larry and his highly intelligent
Speaker 2: dog Steve. The short was broadcast in nineteen ninety seven
Speaker 2: as one of Cartoon Network's World Premiere tunes, at which
Speaker 2: point it caught the eye of a Fox exec who
Speaker 2: initially wanted to run McFarland shorts as part of Mad TV.
Speaker 2: Alah Howe. The Simpsons got its first start as shorts
Speaker 2: on The Tracy Ullman Show, but McFarland actually had to
Speaker 2: pitch Family Guy twice. He was introduced to Leslie Collins
Speaker 2: and Mike Darnell, who ran Fox's alternative comedy department, which
Speaker 2: must have been a thing back then, and he met
Speaker 2: them through a development executive at Hannah barbera who was
Speaker 2: trying to get Hannah Barbara back on primetime. So McFarlane
Speaker 2: took a script and characters and he pitched this to
Speaker 2: but the network had just shelled out for King of
Speaker 2: the Hill and they were not sure how that investment
Speaker 2: was going to pan out, so they passed so in
Speaker 2: about a year, then, after King of the Hill made
Speaker 2: its money back, McFarlane called Fox just to be like, hey,
Speaker 2: any news, and Leslie Collins was like, yeah, come on
Speaker 2: back in.
Speaker 1: So it's crazy, that's actually really nuts about That's actually
Speaker 1: how I got my job at iHeart was that I
Speaker 1: pitched them a show which we're still talking about making yees,
Speaker 1: seven years after I pitched it to him initially, and
Speaker 1: I was directed to somebody who wasn't getting back to me,
Speaker 1: wasn't getting back to me, wasn't getting back to me,
Speaker 1: and I almost just gave up. And then I said,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm gonna try them one more time. And
Speaker 1: then he was like, oh my god, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 1: I completely like, I'm new to this job and I'm
Speaker 1: totally swamped, totally overwhelmed. Let's have a call. And we
Speaker 1: hit it off and became friends and he ended up
Speaker 1: eventually just hiring me. There wasn't like a role. He
Speaker 1: just made a role for me. And that's how I
Speaker 1: got this job. And look at me.
Speaker 2: Now, and look and look at me now, Tom top
Speaker 2: of the world, look at look at me now, look
Speaker 2: at me. I'm getting paper. Ultimately, Fox gave him I
Speaker 2: am grinding, I'm grinding, grindset, mindset. Ultimately Fox gave him
Speaker 2: a proposal do a pilot for fifty grand. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 2: at a time when most half hour animated shows cost
Speaker 2: close to a million dollars. And then they would see
Speaker 2: the idea was that I animate this thing by myself.
Speaker 2: Mccarlan told The New York Times. I spent about six Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's awful. I spent about six months with no sleep
Speaker 2: and no life, just drawing like crazy in my kitchen
Speaker 2: and doing this pilot. About six months later, I handed
Speaker 2: it in about forty pounds lighter, and they were laughing,
Speaker 2: and they liked it enough to order thirteen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: These days, it costs I think around two million dollars
Speaker 1: per Family Guy episode, and I guess that excludes talent fees,
Speaker 1: because the main cast gets something like a quarter million
Speaker 1: dollars an episode. And that figure I saw was like
Speaker 1: ten year years ago, so I don't even want to
Speaker 1: know what it is now.
Speaker 2: Initially, McFarland did most of the show's male voices simply
Speaker 2: out of necessity. Stewie's voice comes from Rex Harrison and
Speaker 2: McFarlane's love of Doctor Doolittle and My Fair Lady, while
Speaker 2: Brian's is the closest to McFarland's actual speaking voice. Do
Speaker 2: you know about the controversy with Stewie. Well, I was
Speaker 2: going to get into the smartest boar on Earth thing,
Speaker 2: but I didn't. I stopped caring.
Speaker 1: Oh well, id care?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was gonna say, this is how we check
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: If that's one thing I'm good at, it's caring, Folks,
Speaker 1: you know that it is.
Speaker 2: He's a wonderful lover with a pretty good dick, Folks.
Speaker 2: If you're hearing this right now, that means I wasn't mad.
Speaker 1: Enough to cut it out. Interestingly, there was a comic strip,
Speaker 1: I think it was a local Chicago comic strip that
Speaker 1: was later turned into a series of graphic novels in
Speaker 1: the early nineties, like mid nineties round ninety five called
Speaker 1: Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest kid on Earth and this boy,
Speaker 1: he's a boy with a big football shaped head, I think,
Speaker 1: who invents things to escape from his mother. And the
Speaker 1: creator of this strip, guy named Chris Ware, is quoted
Speaker 1: as calling the similarities between his character Jimmy Corrigan and
Speaker 1: Stewie as quote a little coincidental, to be simply well coincidental,
Speaker 1: and Seth MacFarlane actually agreed, he said in that two
Speaker 1: That's the three interview, although he claims he never saw
Speaker 1: the comic strip before, he called the similarities quote pretty
Speaker 1: shocking and added that he quote understood how where would
Speaker 1: reach that conclusion.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean the reason that I don't, like fully
Speaker 2: go in on him for this is that the world
Speaker 2: of early nineties comic books was very cloistered, and if
Speaker 2: he grew up, if Seth was in Connecticut and then
Speaker 2: Rhode Island, the chances of him bumping into and then
Speaker 2: reading an episode of an underground like alt comic were
Speaker 2: pretty slim. So I think there's a degree of plausibility
Speaker 2: that when he's like because even I mean, I was
Speaker 2: a moderate comic book nerd, and I didn't learn about
Speaker 2: all comics like ghost World, and you know, Jimmy Corrigan
Speaker 2: and Love and Rockets until I got to college and
Speaker 2: like took a course about the history of comic books.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool, So I want to I want to grant
Speaker 2: him a degree of like I hear you. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1: Seth did clear up another big bit of Stewie lore
Speaker 1: in a two thousand and nine interview with Playboy in
Speaker 1: which he confirmed that Stewie is gay and considered an
Speaker 1: episode where he officially came out, which I don't think
Speaker 1: they ever ended up doing, although, as you said, I
Speaker 1: have tuned out of the last fifteen.
Speaker 2: Century of seasons. Yes, no, I I think that character
Speaker 2: got so much more funny when he just turned into
Speaker 2: like they, I mean, the early leg I'm gonna kill
Speaker 2: like Lewis, I'm going to kill you like all that mother.
Speaker 1: Uh, Jim Morrison as Rex Erison or vice versa.
Speaker 2: Now I'm trying to remember the ones. The one quote
Speaker 2: that I used to that I that I downloaded from Kazah.
Speaker 2: Maybe it wasn't burned that well into my brain, or
Speaker 2: maybe I've made room for it with for Jazzar Peggios.
Speaker 1: Were security number.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Uh, that character got a lot funny and
Speaker 2: when he was just sort of a foil to Brian,
Speaker 2: like when they started just pairing them together in all
Speaker 2: the Road episodes like that, that was a that was
Speaker 2: smart of them.
Speaker 1: Yes, meanwhile, that's about Peter.
Speaker 2: I can't do Peter. I can't do that voice. Peter Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: as McFarland told NPR, is very much the quintessential big fat,
Speaker 2: loud New England guy who is very very good at
Speaker 2: the core, big hearted, but just has zero self editing mechanism,
Speaker 2: no idea what is appropriate and inappropriate, and you just
Speaker 2: kind of have to forgive him because he doesn't know
Speaker 2: any better. And I knew so many of those guys.
Speaker 2: My father knew tons of those guys when we were
Speaker 2: living back East. Specifically, McFarland has said that Peter's voice
Speaker 2: came for security guards he would overhear talking on the
Speaker 2: Risdy campus. Also U and this is hilarious, as The
Speaker 2: New York Times rather drolly noted in a profile. McFarlane
Speaker 2: has also mentioned as an inspiration a friend's father who
Speaker 2: fell asleep and began snoring loudly during the critically praised
Speaker 2: film Philadelphia, a drama about aids I need.
Speaker 1: Someone was watching Tree of Life that Brad Pitt like
Speaker 1: three hour meditation on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's charismatic, it's beautiful, there's dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: Her mom sat there silently throughout the entire thing, and
Speaker 1: as soon as it ended in the credits all she
Speaker 1: stood up and went dumb and walked out of the room.
Speaker 2: That's pretty good our soul review. Oh was she wrong?
Speaker 2: I who's to say? Who is?
Speaker 1: Who is to say?
Speaker 2: Art is subjective? That's why we love it, don't we, folks?
Speaker 2: Except for my art, which is objectively correct. And I
Speaker 2: will see you all driven before me one day.
Speaker 1: Family Guy's other biggest contributor is Alex Borstein, at the
Speaker 1: time a breakout star on Mad TV.
Speaker 2: I forgot about that, A deeply racist character. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: she was like miss Kwan or whatever. Yeah, I forgot
Speaker 2: about it, like fully doing Yellow Phase. Yeah, I forgot
Speaker 2: yeah right now? Yes, yeah.
Speaker 1: She came via Fox except Leslie Collins, who asked boristein
Speaker 1: to voice lowest quote for next to no money McFarland
Speaker 1: joke to ign although it probably wasn't a joke.
Speaker 2: It was sketch comedy mixed in with the sitcom, and
Speaker 2: it was so dense.
Speaker 1: She told The La Times in twenty twenty four of
Speaker 1: what initially appealed to her about the show. Each episode
Speaker 1: has so much in it, and I just knew it
Speaker 1: was special and weird and made laugh out loud throughout.
Speaker 1: By McFarland's estimation, Borstein did quote probably seventy five percent
Speaker 1: of our female voices and also wrote for the show,
Speaker 1: which I didn't know, helping to rain in the fraddy
Speaker 1: sensibilities of the rest of the presumably male team. You
Speaker 1: know why everybody in the show just rags on Meg
Speaker 1: Griffin was because all the predominantly male writers realize that
Speaker 1: they did not to write for a tech girl, so
Speaker 1: they're just like just make fun of her.
Speaker 2: Every time someone started saying something that makes shut up Meg,
Speaker 2: And God, that still gets me, dude. I'm sorry. I
Speaker 2: know there's all kinds of gendered stuff in there and whatever,
Speaker 2: but like, who lets you back in the house, funny
Speaker 2: non moments of extreme cruelty.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's not a gender thing. I mean
Speaker 1: I think about like, you know, Donny, you're out of
Speaker 1: your element from Big.
Speaker 2: That's always funny to have one character irrationally furious at
Speaker 2: another one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's just love, that's just comedy gold, that's just
Speaker 1: good writing. Fellows's voice, Borstein explained to NPR in twenty fifteen,
Speaker 1: it's a direct rip off of a cousin of mine
Speaker 1: on Long Island. Her accent's a little different. She's Hungarian,
Speaker 1: so it's Hungarian and Long Island mixed together. It's like
Speaker 1: a cat dying.
Speaker 2: It's terrible. Yeah, that does sound quite awful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Borstin and McFarland's heavy character loads meant a lot
Speaker 1: of time in recording Boots. I usually do all one
Speaker 1: character first, like I'll do Lois first, and once I
Speaker 1: finished that, I'll go back through and I'll do Tricia
Speaker 1: Takanawa or Babs or whatever. Borsting told bleedingcool dot com.
Speaker 2: You heard me, you read me.
Speaker 1: I usually end up playing five characters in one episode,
Speaker 1: so I go back through five times and do each
Speaker 1: character separately. Oddly enough, Thorsten recalled the ign that at first,
Speaker 1: between the pilot and the show's pickup, the network wanted
Speaker 1: to get rid of me. She said, I had the
Speaker 1: fight to keep my job. I had to re audition
Speaker 1: for it, along with every female that ever stepped off
Speaker 1: a bus in Hollywood. Seth Green, who was then more
Speaker 1: known for his role on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and
Speaker 1: presumably Austin Powers. Yeah, the first one came out in
Speaker 1: ninety seven, so okay, around the same time, and Can't
Speaker 1: Hardly was.
Speaker 2: Also in He was in Idle Hands, Oh Yeah, which
Speaker 2: is a bad movie. Car Harley Waite's a great movie.
Speaker 2: It's an even better replacement song. I'm pretty sure. I'm
Speaker 2: pretty sure Paul Westerberg still gets royalties off that. That
Speaker 2: might be why he doesn't feel the need to work
Speaker 2: Seth Green.
Speaker 1: He was brought in to play Peter and Lois's son,
Speaker 1: Chris pattering his distinctive voice on Ted Levine as Buffalo
Speaker 1: Bill from Silence of the Lambs. That's incredible. I never
Speaker 1: picked up on that. He apparently had been screwing around
Speaker 1: with an impression of Buffalo Bill with a bunch of
Speaker 1: his friends and they dared him to do it at
Speaker 1: the audition, and apparently he ended up getting the role
Speaker 1: because he was one of the only guys, if not
Speaker 1: the only guy who didn't do a surfer dude voice.
Speaker 1: Ah Sean Penn's character from Fastest Ridgemont High.
Speaker 2: I think he asked McFarlane, he was like, do you
Speaker 2: mind if I just do something really weird, and McFarland
Speaker 2: was like, yeah, sure, and so he was like, well
Speaker 2: on your dad, Like I don't know that now we're
Speaker 2: sure a great big fat woman. That's sort of That's
Speaker 2: the closest I can get to Buffalo Bill.
Speaker 1: I used to be able to do it. I used
Speaker 1: to be able to do it because there was a
Speaker 1: guy went to college with who sounded just like Chris
Speaker 1: in real life, and I used to imitate him and
Speaker 1: then it occurred to.
Speaker 2: Me so weird.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the key was so weird. That was like the
Speaker 1: thing he used to always say, and then I can't
Speaker 1: do the rest of it.
Speaker 2: Also, like in every episode, at least one character just goes,
Speaker 2: what the hell? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I know that's gotta be I asked McFarlan, ever comments
Speaker 1: on that, because that is like a thing that keeps
Speaker 1: coming up in like things you didn't know about family
Speaker 1: guy posts. Yeah, it's in like every episode somebody does
Speaker 1: the derivation of what the hell? Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker 2: During one episode.
Speaker 1: I forgot about this until researching this episode, Seth Green
Speaker 1: as Chris does, there's a whole bit.
Speaker 2: Where just call it the tucking bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Chris recreates the Buffalo Bill Goodbye Horses, dress up
Speaker 1: from Silence of the Lambs.
Speaker 2: It's a great bit. It's a great bit, good one
Speaker 2: to do at parties. Speaking of voice actors, I didn't
Speaker 2: know this.
Speaker 1: The show initially cast Lacey Shabert, your beloved Gretchen Winters
Speaker 1: for Mean Girls as the voice.
Speaker 2: Of miss a pretty pretty brunette.
Speaker 1: You love lazy Shber? I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't love Lacey Shepard such a crush on her.
Speaker 2: I went to go see that and she lost in
Speaker 2: Space movie where Matt LeBlanc is the good guy and
Speaker 2: Gary Oldman becomes a bug monster. Was she Penny, Yeah,
Speaker 2: if that's the character she was the girl? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh, I had a big crush on Penny as a kid,
Speaker 1: because Penny was in the in the Silent Music too,
Speaker 1: Angela cart right man speaking of like bad stuff that
Speaker 1: we watched because we loved the women in it. I
Speaker 1: watched Mikey Madison on SNL this weekend. Oh yeah, first
Speaker 1: time I've watched the Asonal episode many many many years.
Speaker 2: Oh, the one where Morgan Wallen like walked off because
Speaker 2: all those big city liberals were making him feel bad
Speaker 2: about being a drunk racist.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean I think he took one for the
Speaker 1: team and saw that otherwise the headline was going to
Speaker 1: be that it was just a bad episode and didn't
Speaker 1: want my sweet Mikey Addison too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yah, yeah, I'm sure he did that out of
Speaker 2: the largest of his enlarge heart. Oh guy is such
Speaker 2: a piece of shit.
Speaker 1: Is see the guy who threw the chairs off the
Speaker 1: off like the deck bar in Nashville and like almost
Speaker 1: killed someone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm pretty and he's like he was like
Speaker 2: definitely on camera saying the saying the hard end. I
Speaker 2: think he's just like he's like basically just like a
Speaker 2: Southern like frat boy. Yeah, he's from Sneadville, Tennessee. What
Speaker 2: do you think about that? Sneadville is not a character
Speaker 2: from the lar Ax. Yeah, he got he got into
Speaker 2: he he left Kid Rock's bar after breaking glasses in
Speaker 2: it and started like just screaming at people on the street.
Speaker 2: He was unmasked. He was like going around and unmasked
Speaker 2: during the height of COVID in bars. Yes, and he
Speaker 2: threw roof off of Eric Church another country. He just
Speaker 2: goes in other country stars with better careers bars and
Speaker 2: destroys their stuff. Yeah, he threw a chair, He threw
Speaker 2: a chair off the roof. Oh yeah, he was out
Speaker 2: and he was outside of his place in Nashville when
Speaker 2: someone filmed him saying, take care of this piss puss
Speaker 2: pussy ass mother and then drops the N word.
Speaker 1: When you say his place, you mean his home or his.
Speaker 2: Yea, his home. He and his label donated five hundred
Speaker 2: thousand dollars to organizations including the National Museum of African Music,
Speaker 2: Rock A Dance Racism, and the BNAC. So, I guess
Speaker 2: we don't talk about that anymore. That guy sucks. Come
Speaker 2: to my bar, buddy, I won't even wait for you
Speaker 2: to get drunk. Drop your ass just for beauty.
Speaker 1: Piece of call your bar God's country.
Speaker 2: I should should not, well, every bar is God's country
Speaker 2: to the faithful among us alcoholics.
Speaker 1: Was I talking about Jordan Lazy Shaber Lacy Shabert, Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: so I had no idea. She was the voice of
Speaker 1: Meg for the entire first season, not just the pilot,
Speaker 1: the entire first season. Actually no, she wasn't the voice
Speaker 1: on the pilot. Seth MacFarlane's sister because he had no money,
Speaker 1: got his sister to be the voice of Meg, and
Speaker 1: then the rest of the first season was Lazy Saber
Speaker 1: and then she ended up leaving after the first season,
Speaker 1: but there was no drama involved.
Speaker 2: I wanted there to be so much drama involved. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it was literally just like she was like I was
Speaker 2: a child and already on one TV show.
Speaker 1: So she was on Party of five. I forgot about that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just she's like I needed to go to school. Uh.
Speaker 1: Meilacunas had no such concerns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, fifteen dude, was she like trafficked tier? I
Speaker 2: don't know how she actually wound up on.
Speaker 1: Is Aston Kutcher really into like anti human trafficking stuff?
Speaker 2: Well yeah, I mean then there's also the fact that
Speaker 2: he like definitely started courting her when she was like fifteen.
Speaker 1: My favorite story about me Lacunas and I have one
Speaker 1: was that she got was that she got her job
Speaker 1: on that seventy show and the producers were like, are
Speaker 1: you aeen? And she said, I'll be eighteen on my
Speaker 1: birthday and she was fifteen, and she was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I will be eighteen on my birthday, not my next birthday.
Speaker 2: But clever girl. That somehow worked.
Speaker 1: Somebody must have checked. I don't know. It's a great story.
Speaker 2: I love that print legend.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, but yeah, she was already working on that
Speaker 1: seventy show when Fox asked her to audition to play
Speaker 1: the voice of Meg. I'm family guy. She was fifteen
Speaker 1: years old, working on getting her driver's permit and I
Speaker 1: never heard this, but still battling her native Russian accent
Speaker 1: for certain pronunciations. That's crazy to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I don't know how they got around it as
Speaker 2: much on that seventies show, but like there's a whole
Speaker 2: bit where they were talking about her trying to get
Speaker 2: the word electricity right because she kept saying electricity.
Speaker 1: It is crazy to me. I know, like very well,
Speaker 1: like maybe half a dozen people who moved here in
Speaker 1: their like mid to eighteens from other countries and barely
Speaker 1: spoke English, and now they speak flawlessly without an accent.
Speaker 2: I don't underst standard.
Speaker 1: And I've was trained in eight years of French, as
Speaker 1: I think, were you, And it's like nope.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but that was our fault, from picking the
Speaker 2: lamest romance language. What are you gonna do with that?
Speaker 2: What are you gonna take your French language? Go order
Speaker 2: at a restaurant? French hate the French, hate you for
Speaker 2: even trying. Yeah, like, what's the point As you meditate
Speaker 2: on that, We'll be right back with more too much
Speaker 2: information after these messages. What we're talking about again?
Speaker 3: Uh?
Speaker 1: Oh more voices?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah. So, rather than have McFarlane or Borstein imitate
Speaker 2: voices for the volley of cutaway jokes that the show
Speaker 2: is known for, production deliberately made it a bit to
Speaker 2: track down actors from not just you know, regular anonymous
Speaker 2: voiceover guys like the guy who played Roadblock on G I. Joe,
Speaker 2: but also like George Went from Cheers. Director Dan Povenmeier
Speaker 2: told I g N that when they first reached out,
Speaker 2: George Went was like, why didn't you guys just pull
Speaker 2: this from Cheers? Because it's it's exactly the lines I
Speaker 2: said in the show. And he was like, I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm happy to get paid. But they literally brought him
Speaker 2: in to do it for just one line. I love
Speaker 2: that too. McFarlane got another utility hitter in his old
Speaker 2: Rizzie buddy Mike Henry, who he tapped for the show's pilot.
Speaker 2: Henry voices Herbert, who's the old man in the walker. Oh,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna get you what I'm gonna get you? A
Speaker 2: little Pigley ass. You get your ass back. Here's some bitch.
Speaker 2: That's that's I think.
Speaker 1: I think that's the one, right, I know, it's exactly
Speaker 1: the one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, get you a little pig ass back here, some bitch.
Speaker 1: You know, the popsicles guy.
Speaker 2: Jess is gonna go. Oh, Jess is gonna go out,
Speaker 2: makes his peeps and poops. God. Well he does that,
Speaker 2: and then he does Bruce the performance artist, who is like, oh, absolutely,
Speaker 2: I can do Spider Man. I can pretend, like, you know,
Speaker 2: go on a costume and shoot them with my web
Speaker 2: fluid and pretends the kids are all just you know,
Speaker 2: the little buds cut up in my web.
Speaker 1: Isn't Vincent Price doing the like steamed salmon in the
Speaker 1: dishwasher pit. It sounds like Vincent Price.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a little bit, a little bit. And then he
Speaker 2: also does until twenty twenty one, for reasons that should
Speaker 2: now be obvious. He also voiced Cleveland. The show filled
Speaker 2: out the rest of its voice talent with regular celebrities
Speaker 2: and comics like Patrick Warburton is Peter's neighbor Joe, Jennifer
Speaker 2: Tilly is Joe's wife Bonnie, and Norm McDonald as Death
Speaker 2: replacing Adam Carolla, who sucks and then death replaced nor McDonald.
Speaker 1: I know, I'm sorry. He is one of my favorite people.
Speaker 1: I am so sorry. I'm sorry, but it was right there,
Speaker 1: and you know what, he would have done it.
Speaker 2: That's true, that's true, he would have. I just saw
Speaker 2: this bit of him recently on talking to John Stewart
Speaker 2: about the Crocodile Hunter, and John Stewart is like, please
Speaker 2: don't make me laugh at this right now, man.
Speaker 1: Please, because it was like the week it happened, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, He's like, how much it would have been sucked
Speaker 2: to that it was a he was the Crocodile Hunter
Speaker 2: and a sting ray got him, like at the Alligator
Speaker 2: the Crocodile meeting the next week, and Carl's like, that
Speaker 2: one should have been us. I almost had him shut up, Joe, No,
Speaker 2: you didn't, is he? Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel
Speaker 2: like a genius.
Speaker 1: Well yes, I feel like I've never encountered a celebrity who,
Speaker 1: instantaneously after their death was appreciated on such a vastly
Speaker 1: higher level than he was when he was alive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: nobody realized what a genius he was until like all
Speaker 1: the compilation videos after he died.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think comedy fans did. I mean, he was
Speaker 2: like big in the community and my absolute favorite. I
Speaker 2: think it's him Corolla as death instead of Norm MacDonald.
Speaker 2: But don't make me chase you. I got flow, Joe.
Speaker 2: You don't think I can have flow Joe. You don't
Speaker 2: think I can run you down and then immediately trips
Speaker 2: and falls. But a number of other industry veterans with
Speaker 2: some surprising resumes also helped to give voice to co Hog.
Speaker 2: The town is named after kind of edible clam, which
Speaker 2: appears right next to Quagmire in the dictionary, So I
Speaker 2: think we know where he got the name for that character.
Speaker 1: But he said edible clam, which is a really great
Speaker 1: name for a band o ediple clam and.
Speaker 2: Like a disorder. Yeah yeah. John G. Brannon, the creative
Speaker 2: the Jerky Boys as mort Goldman and Horace the Bartender,
Speaker 2: I think brought on solely because Seth Macfarlande liked Jerky Boys.
Speaker 2: Carlos alas Raki, who I must remind everyone, is the
Speaker 2: voice of Rocco from Rocco's Modern Life, The Talk about
Speaker 2: Chihuahua and spy Row the Dragon. In addition to his
Speaker 2: work on Reno Naima Wan. I think his first appearance
Speaker 2: is as mister Weed, Peter's boss at the Factor also
Speaker 2: does other voices. Laurie Allen, who's been playing Pearl Crabs
Speaker 2: on SpongeBob for nearly thirty years, is also a utility
Speaker 2: voice actor on Family Guy. Phil Lamar, who's one of
Speaker 2: the most prolific voice actors in Hollywood. Nw Borstein from
Speaker 2: Mad TV ems also the voice of Samurai Jack. This
Speaker 2: is interesting, Butch Harmon, the creator of The Fairly Odd
Speaker 2: Parents and Danny Phantom also came over to do vo
Speaker 2: work randomly. I think that's like another animation insider connection,
Speaker 2: because there's two connections to Fairly Odd Parents in Family Guy.
Speaker 2: One is the show's creator, Butch Harmon, who also created
Speaker 2: Danny Fantom, does voices on Family Guy. But then one
Speaker 2: of the show's two composers. I don't know who they
Speaker 2: have now, but when they first started and for a
Speaker 2: long time, the guy's name is Ron Jones. He was
Speaker 2: also on Fairly Godparents. So there's some kind of a
Speaker 2: connection there, or at least McFarlane liked the show.
Speaker 1: That would make sense. It kind of looks like twisted fifties.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Fun fact that I also just learned. Couldn't think
Speaker 2: anywhere else to put this the recurring Portuguese fishermen characters.
Speaker 2: There is actually a large Portuguese American fishing community located
Speaker 2: in southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
Speaker 1: You found this, but I'm stealing this because I love
Speaker 1: it so much.
Speaker 2: Please for IMDb.
Speaker 1: A number of actors have made their last appearances on
Speaker 1: Family Guy. These include Waylon Jennings in two thousand and one,
Speaker 1: All he's not really an actor, Carol Channing in two
Speaker 1: thousand and six. She didn't die until like ten years later.
Speaker 2: Too.
Speaker 1: Well, she was like super old, was like one hundred. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Roy Scheider from Jaws and all that Jazz and my
Speaker 1: favorite Bob Fossei movies. And William Woodson in two thousand
Speaker 1: and nine. Robert Lojia, who I totally.
Speaker 2: Forgot, was dead in twenty thirteen. This is a nasty
Speaker 2: way for me to find out.
Speaker 1: Lauren Baccall and Dennis Farina in twenty fourteen, and Frank
Speaker 1: Sinatra Junior in twenty sixteen. I can't believe he was
Speaker 1: on on Carrie Fisher in twenty seven Yeah, we.
Speaker 2: Didn't really talk about the Star Wars episodes, but obviously
Speaker 2: that's its own unique niche in the Family Guy universe,
Speaker 2: which is funny. The coolest thing about them is that
Speaker 2: they were completely above board, Like they got permission from
Speaker 2: Lucasfilm to do them, but then Seth MacFarlane and like
Speaker 2: some of those showrunners, went up to Skywalker Ranch to
Speaker 2: screen them for George Lucas and apparently he found them hilarious,
Speaker 2: So I think.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was a huge fan and he basically gave
Speaker 1: him carte blanche to do whatever they wanted indefinitely.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, Hell yeah.
Speaker 1: Disney owns Star Wars now and Disney owns twentieth Century Fox,
Speaker 1: So I guess, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess that parody will never see the light
Speaker 2: of day, is what we guess.
Speaker 1: Oh, here we go, we cannot speaking of beloved properties, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Who could forget Batman himself Adam West playing Adam West,
Speaker 2: the mayor of co Hog. McFarlane met West when he
Speaker 2: also played himself on an episode of Johnny Bravo that
Speaker 2: McFarlane written, I think he was a mayor, Yes he
Speaker 2: was also Yeah, McFarland told the club, I think he
Speaker 2: likes playing into what he's known for, even on a
Speaker 2: casual basis. He's a really fun guy to work with
Speaker 2: and genuinely gets comedy. It's not the type of situation
Speaker 2: where you just bring someone in to make fun of themselves.
Speaker 2: The character we've created is kind of this alternate universe
Speaker 2: Adam West, where he's the mayor of this town, and
Speaker 2: we deliberately have not made any references to Batman because
Speaker 2: we like keeping that separate. It's the obvious place to go.
Speaker 2: The show did retire the character when West died in
Speaker 2: twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: That was one of my favorite bits of all those
Speaker 1: early seasons of Family Guy. I mean the bathroom bit
Speaker 1: where he's like slinking through the hallway and he sees
Speaker 1: the three bathrooms men women, Adam West.
Speaker 2: He starts to go in the Anam West. No, No,
Speaker 2: we'll be expats five that back. It's so good. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then it's funny too because they initially had named
Speaker 2: the high school in the show James Woods High, and
Speaker 2: then James Woods out of himself as like a Trump freak,
Speaker 2: and they renamed it Adam West High.
Speaker 1: So I didn't realize that, and James Woods was like on.
Speaker 2: The show, right, Yeah, he was in before that too. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And I think they just cut ties with him. I
Speaker 2: think like Seth, you know, Seth MacFarland is a pretty
Speaker 2: like you know, Northeast middle light blue Democrat, so a
Speaker 2: lot of his like Brian, Like Brian driving around in
Speaker 2: a preas with like a Hillary Clinton bumper sticker on.
Speaker 2: It was like a bit of a self own I think.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, writer and co executive producer Steve Callahan told
Speaker 1: IGN in twenty twelve, for the first couple months of
Speaker 1: production on Family Guy, we didn't have offices and we
Speaker 1: were crammed into one room that was sort of being
Speaker 1: borrowed from King of the Hill, who.
Speaker 2: Hated them, who hated them.
Speaker 1: It was like we were caged animals in there because
Speaker 1: we would spend ten twelve hours a day in this
Speaker 1: one room and with a cast in hand. Twenty four
Speaker 1: year old Seth MacFarland became television's youngest executive producer probably
Speaker 1: still certainly, Yeah, I don't think young people are getting
Speaker 1: in a network TV now. And the first episode of
Speaker 1: Family Guy aired on January thirty, first, ninety nine, after.
Speaker 2: The Super Bowl. Am I remembering that right? Yes? I
Speaker 2: I remember watching that. Yeah, Yeah, that's why it had
Speaker 2: such a crazy share out of the gate. It did
Speaker 2: really well for a little while.
Speaker 1: Twenty two million or something, which is hysterical. I think
Speaker 1: got to like number thirty three on Nielsen's that week,
Speaker 1: which and for twenty two million these days is like
Speaker 1: the sum total of people watching network. Yes, these early
Speaker 1: Family Guy episodes went with dramatic titles like Death Has
Speaker 1: a Shadow and Mind Over Murder, and these were tributes
Speaker 1: to McFarland's love of radio thrillers from the nineteen thirties
Speaker 1: and forties. Nerd though, in his own words, it got
Speaker 1: confusing and stopped being funny, so we stopped.
Speaker 2: I appreciate the candor.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think. I also read that he wanted every
Speaker 1: episode to touch on death in some way.
Speaker 2: Interesting I did, But good for him. Everything is touched
Speaker 2: by death, and you know it's coming for all of us.
Speaker 2: And as soon as you get right with that, soon
Speaker 2: you can move on with your actualization whatever that might be.
Speaker 2: That was just a PSA that has nothing to do
Speaker 2: with the show.
Speaker 1: Well, higel, moving on from death, let's talk about one
Speaker 1: of your other great loves.
Speaker 2: One thing that said Family Guy apart was the depth
Speaker 2: of its music. Yes, each episode uses a fifty to
Speaker 2: ninety piece orchestra. That's insane.
Speaker 1: Start.
Speaker 2: There were two guys behind that. One of them is
Speaker 2: Walter Murphy. And unless you already know this, not in
Speaker 2: a thousand years would you be able to name the
Speaker 2: one hit wonder He wrote.
Speaker 1: I actually knew this, but I will yeah, okay, flex God,
Speaker 1: sit down, be humble.
Speaker 2: Drop the Kendrick sample in there. He wrote a fifth
Speaker 2: of Beethoven, which is that really annoying thing that comes
Speaker 2: on AM radio on long drives that is like you're like,
Speaker 2: why are there like hats and like octave bass under
Speaker 2: this Beethoven thing? Walter and Murphy Baby That's Why became
Speaker 2: a huge hit as a single in nineteen seventy six,
Speaker 2: and was subsequently featured on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack
Speaker 2: the following year, which itself was a giant hit. Murphy
Speaker 2: repeatedly tried to cash in on that formula. He made
Speaker 2: a showed more of disco fied classical. Oh yeah. Go
Speaker 2: to his Wikipedia page. The man did not know actually
Speaker 2: when to let it go.
Speaker 1: They were good.
Speaker 2: I did not listen to them. It's like musical theater,
Speaker 2: Like I like disco and I like classical music. When
Speaker 2: you push the two of them together, they both become terrible.
Speaker 2: Murphy was approached by McFarlane, who had the concept for
Speaker 2: the Family Guy opening sequins and its lyrics. He said,
Speaker 2: we're going to start with this all in the family reference,
Speaker 2: and then I wanted to cut away to a big,
Speaker 2: like show tune style Broadway number, and I have the lyrics,
Speaker 2: so I think it's funny. Murphy in an interview said
Speaker 2: something like I sent my first version to him and
Speaker 2: he said, make it swing more, so I did, uh,
Speaker 2: And then he recorded the voice actors and himself doing everything.
Speaker 1: He does a great version of You Make Me Feel
Speaker 1: So Young The Sanatcha song, Mmm like as Stewie. It's
Speaker 1: really good.
Speaker 2: He did say it was easier to sing in character
Speaker 2: because it like it makes you less self conscious.
Speaker 1: That was how I had to learn to sing. I
Speaker 1: had to when I wanted to do the theatrical productions
Speaker 1: in high school and I specifically said I don't want
Speaker 1: to sing, but I would like to be in them,
Speaker 1: and they said, well, too bad. You have to. If
Speaker 1: you want audition, you have to sing as part of
Speaker 1: the audition. And I desperately wanted to be involved because
Speaker 1: all the girls I liked were involved, and that was
Speaker 1: of course knows what you did, yeah, And so I
Speaker 1: was so sky. I come from a long line of
Speaker 1: non dancers and may we were afraid of singing, like
Speaker 1: It's like an actual like phobia of my father's.
Speaker 2: And I sort of inherited it.
Speaker 1: And I was so nervous that I listened to a
Speaker 1: bunch of probably like was seth MacFarland did a bunch
Speaker 1: of like fifties and sixties krooners, like Bobby Darren and
Speaker 1: Harry Nielsen album where we did a bunch of like
Speaker 1: the Great American songbook stuff, And so I just listened
Speaker 1: to all that, and then I just imitated them at
Speaker 1: the audition, and I did so well that I kept
Speaker 1: getting singing parts for the rest of my high school
Speaker 1: experience and would spend the pre show time in the
Speaker 1: bathroom throwing up because I was so nervous. So I
Speaker 1: kind of backfired, and I don't think I did it
Speaker 1: anyone in the drama club no, So all in all
Speaker 1: was a massive fail.
Speaker 2: This is a pretty Lore Jordan Lore heavy episode. Already,
Speaker 2: I'm liking this. We'll see if we can get you
Speaker 2: down to like a traumatic memory from grade school by
Speaker 2: the time, we're done. Okay. The biggest problem with recording
Speaker 2: the initial theme song was that Fox hadn't drafted a
Speaker 2: budget yet for the show's music, so they did it
Speaker 2: with one trumpet player playing all the trumpet parts, the
Speaker 2: trombone player and the sax player, and then Murphy played
Speaker 2: everything else. We got some background singers to come in
Speaker 2: and sing, and then I gave that to Seth and
Speaker 2: he recorded the rest of it. McFarland toldt NPR. We
Speaker 2: had to fight pretty hard to do a theme. It's
Speaker 2: a tradition that's kind of going away, and part of
Speaker 2: that is the networks are worried that people don't want
Speaker 2: to sit through the same thing week after week, and
Speaker 2: so shows are being discouraged from writing themes once they
Speaker 2: had more money. Murphy offered to re record this song,
Speaker 2: but McFarlane said it was perfect as it was. However,
Speaker 2: he did re record Stewie's line in the song in
Speaker 2: later seasons because too many people thought the character was
Speaker 2: saying ef and cry instead of laugh and cry. Nicely done,
Speaker 2: and yes, of course the opening is all in the
Speaker 2: Family of reference an homage, said McFarland. Fucking loved All
Speaker 2: in the Family as well he should. It's one of
Speaker 2: the best sitcoms ever made. Yes. Either way, Murphy has
Speaker 2: scored three hundred and sixty six episodes of the show,
Speaker 2: so it's just approaching four hundred and fifty, so aload
Speaker 2: of them, as well as mcfarlan's hit surprise movie Ted
Speaker 2: and for some reason, Agent Cody Banks. Another Family Guy composer,
Speaker 2: Ron Jones we mentioned at the top, came over from
Speaker 2: Fairly Odd Parents scored the show for its first twelve seasons.
Speaker 2: Jones was mentored by Leilo Friggin Schiffrin while he was
Speaker 2: a student, and also graduated directly into a job for
Speaker 2: Hannah Barbera, where he wrote the Smurfs theme for them.
Speaker 2: He also wrote Ductales for Disney, which is like an
Speaker 2: all time bang banger, and hilariously was the composer for
Speaker 2: the first four seasons of Star Trek the Next Generation.
Speaker 1: One thing that immediately dogged Family Guy was the Simpsons
Speaker 1: comparisons on their faces. Both shows are about working class,
Speaker 1: nuclear families with the same structure, though in Family Guy
Speaker 1: the dog talks. Are there any characters that speak in
Speaker 1: Simpsons that shouldn't? I think I can think of.
Speaker 2: No, I don't think so, but what I was going
Speaker 2: to say is important to note. Also, these shows ripped
Speaker 2: off the Honeymooners, right well every sitcom, yes exactly, but
Speaker 2: like yeah, but like a borish like you know, a
Speaker 2: lot of sitcoms didn't rip off Witched, where the husband
Speaker 2: was like well adjusted and handsome. They all went for
Speaker 2: the slovenly guy. That's true from the er slob himself.
Speaker 2: Jackie Gleason, Baby.
Speaker 1: Is he a good guy? I could imagine we were
Speaker 1: a new friend of the pod who put us straight
Speaker 1: about how Jack Benny, who I thought was a Capitol
Speaker 1: B couple g bad guy along the same lines as
Speaker 1: Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. He let us know that
Speaker 1: Jack Benny was one of the nicest guys in Hollywood,
Speaker 1: And so I retract my statement. I bet you he
Speaker 1: would know about Jackie Gleason. I would imagine he would
Speaker 1: be a tough guy who uh Gleason.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's not great. He had an affair with
Speaker 2: us secretary.
Speaker 1: I mean that's far for the chorus.
Speaker 2: He had multiple affairs.
Speaker 1: They were still in the acceptable range for mid century
Speaker 1: celebrity scumbaggery.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I don't know if he ever like
Speaker 2: beat up a guy or was racist, but you know
Speaker 2: he was he Philandered.
Speaker 1: I had a story that Tony Orlando told me he
Speaker 1: was on one of the shows that I work on.
Speaker 2: Of Tony Orlando and Dawn.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is a story of SETH mcfarli would love.
Speaker 1: When Tony Orlando got his network TV show in the seventies,
Speaker 1: the first guest that they were able to get was
Speaker 1: Jackie Gleeson, which is a huge get because he was,
Speaker 1: you know, a huge star and this was this new singer,
Speaker 1: had like two hits and now he's the sort of
Speaker 1: untried TV guy. To get like one of the biggest
Speaker 1: figures in TV history to come on, it was phenomenal.
Speaker 1: I guess jack Quite was quite exactly. It was credit coup.
Speaker 1: And then Jackie came in and was just kind of
Speaker 1: a nightmare. And then he and then he said some
Speaker 1: not nice things to Tony's backing singers known as Dawn,
Speaker 1: who were both people of color, and oh.
Speaker 2: So he was racist, that was the gist of it.
Speaker 1: And Tony told him off and basically like yelled at
Speaker 1: him and told him get off a set.
Speaker 2: And then good for Tony Orlando.
Speaker 1: Jackie was like chilling out in his dressing room trying
Speaker 1: to calm down. Then he sent word out that he
Speaker 1: wanted to speak to Tony, and Tony's going in there, thinking,
Speaker 1: oh my god, this guy's gonna shank me. And he
Speaker 1: goes in and Jackie apologized that was wrong, and then
Speaker 1: they became friendly. And then from that point onward, after
Speaker 1: every episode of the Tony Orlando Show, Jackie would call
Speaker 1: him and give him affectionate notes and they became friends.
Speaker 2: That's cute. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, he learned not
Speaker 2: to be racist in front of a person of color.
Speaker 2: Is Tony Orlando a person of color? Can I say that?
Speaker 1: I think he's He's a Greek father and a Puerto
Speaker 1: Rican mother.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that counts. We'll run him into the constitution. Oh well,
Speaker 2: hell are we?
Speaker 1: I have no idea where we are now to start
Speaker 1: a new section.
Speaker 2: Oh we haven't even gotten there yet. Oh oh okay,
Speaker 2: Simpson's a family guy.
Speaker 1: That was it, okay. McFarlane has always been opened about
Speaker 1: his love for the Simpson telling ign I love the Simpsons.
Speaker 1: I could have transitioned that better. Sorry, And it sort
Speaker 1: of laid the groundwork, sort of paved the way for
Speaker 1: subsequent animated shows, they sort of established the new method
Speaker 1: of doing primetime animation, but unfortunately this feeling wasn't mutual.
Speaker 2: As McFarland explained to The.
Speaker 1: Av Club in two thousand and five, apparently the Simpsons
Speaker 1: team hate our guts.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure why I've.
Speaker 1: Said this before, but that show at its best is
Speaker 1: up there with the best episodes all in the Family,
Speaker 1: Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke. I was reading
Speaker 1: a quote from one of the writers from a lecture
Speaker 1: that he gave, and he said, quote, the Simpsons staff
Speaker 1: hates Family Guy for a sath. That's got a sting.
Speaker 2: Although they he and Matt Groening did like a panel
Speaker 2: interview many years later where they were like talking about it.
Speaker 2: But it's kind of funny because I don't even think
Speaker 2: Matt Graining was involved in the writing at this point.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, no. One of the earliest examples of this
Speaker 1: beef that you can find is from Simpsons writer and
Speaker 1: show owner Al Jean in a two thousand and three interview.
Speaker 1: I wasn't a big fan of Family Guys, he said,
Speaker 1: to be honest, I thought it was a little too
Speaker 1: derivative of The Simpsons, to the point where I would
Speaker 1: see jokes we did on The Simpsons, or a critic
Speaker 1: on Family Guy, they should be more original. Rich Appell,
Speaker 1: who was a writer and became a showrunner on King
Speaker 1: of the Hill before becoming a showrunner on Family Guy,
Speaker 1: was in the writer's room for The Simpsons when it
Speaker 1: was canceled. I remember being a writer.
Speaker 2: Because The Simpsons has never been canceled.
Speaker 1: It never will be. Yeah, it will be limping through
Speaker 1: until the asteroid comes. I remember being a writer at
Speaker 1: the Simpsons when the Family Guy was canceled, and then
Speaker 1: I thought, good riddance. He told the La Times in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four, there's only so much nipping at your
Speaker 1: heels you can really indulge. Writer Mike Rice wrote in
Speaker 1: the twenty eighteen book Springfield Confidential that quote. When Family
Speaker 1: Guy debuted ten years into the Simpsons run, our younger
Speaker 1: writers were incensed. It's just vulgar, it moves too fast,
Speaker 1: it's nothing but pop culture references. I had to laugh.
Speaker 1: These are all the things people said about The Simpsons
Speaker 1: when it began. Staff would complain endlessly about Family Guy.
Speaker 1: He continued managing the whole two completely contradictory opinions. One,
Speaker 1: it's exactly like our show. And two they do things
Speaker 1: we'd never do. The latter is where the show's charm lies.
Speaker 1: He continues, I'm a jaded old TV writer, but that
Speaker 1: show somehow manages to shock me on a weekly basis.
Speaker 1: That might be We're touching on this at the beginning
Speaker 1: of the episode after watching Family Guy, the Simpsons never
Speaker 1: really shocked me again, I think that maybe it was part.
Speaker 2: No, But I mean, I think that a lot of
Speaker 2: people are missing the the very like the important cultural
Speaker 2: context that like, when The Simpsons first came out, it
Speaker 2: was a moral outrage. I mean the fact that Bart said,
Speaker 2: like what the hell, and like eat my shorts, told
Speaker 2: his dad to eat my shorts. Like people were fully
Speaker 2: like the Reagan nights that were, you know, still breathing,
Speaker 2: were like fully in a moral panic about this. And
Speaker 2: so it is funny that he says it's the younger
Speaker 2: writers who came in about it, because yeah, they probably
Speaker 2: felt like it was beneath them, but they hadn't been
Speaker 2: there when that show was the punching bag.
Speaker 1: You know, was it Barbara Bush or Nancy Reagan who
Speaker 1: called out Marge Simpson in a speech and then somebody
Speaker 1: from the Simpsons Show wrote a letter as Marge that
Speaker 1: was like very sweet, like.
Speaker 2: You know, I I don't know anything about that. Oh
Speaker 2: oh wait a minute, I need to pull this out.
Speaker 2: I know Barbara Bush. I think Barbara Bush had talked
Speaker 2: a lot about the bar Was Barbara Bush? Yeah, she
Speaker 2: talked a lot about the Simpsons. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It was a note to Barbara Bush obstensively from Marge Simpson.
Speaker 1: Dear first lady, I recently read your criticism of my family.
Speaker 2: I was deeply hurt. Heaven. Those were far from.
Speaker 1: Perfect, and, if truth be known, maybe just a wee
Speaker 1: bit short of normal. But as doctor SEUs says, a
Speaker 1: person is a person. I try to teach my children Bart,
Speaker 1: Lisa and even little Maggie always to give somebody the
Speaker 1: benefit of the doubt and not talk badly about them,
Speaker 1: even if they're rich. It's hard to get them to
Speaker 1: understand this advice when the very first lady in the
Speaker 1: country falls us not only dumb, but quote the dumbest
Speaker 1: thing she ever said. All, ma'am, if we're the dumbest
Speaker 1: thing you ever saw, Washington, must be a good deal
Speaker 1: different than what they teach.
Speaker 2: Me at Current Events group at the church.
Speaker 1: I always believed in my heart that we had a
Speaker 1: great deal in common, each of us living our lives
Speaker 1: to serve an exceptional man. I hope there is some
Speaker 1: way out of this controversy. I thought perhaps it would
Speaker 1: be a good start to just speak my mind with
Speaker 1: great respect.
Speaker 2: Marge Simpson that manages like a shocking number of like
Speaker 2: very subtle jabs. Yes, Starbush, I mean again.
Speaker 1: All those Simpsons writers are all Harvard educated, Like, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Barbara Bush wrote back, Dear Marge, how kind of you
Speaker 1: to write, I'm glad you spoke your mind thought dot dot.
Speaker 2: I foolishly didn't know you had one.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at a picture of you depicted on a
Speaker 1: plastic cup with your blue hair filled with pink birds
Speaker 1: peeking out all over. Evidently you and your charming family Lisa, Homer,
Speaker 1: Bart and Maggie are camping out. It is a nice
Speaker 1: family scene. Clearly you're setting a good example for the
Speaker 1: rest of the country. Please forgive a loose tongue warmly,
Speaker 1: Barbara Bush.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's certainly one of the stupid things to
Speaker 2: ever come out of the White House.
Speaker 1: But oh so, ps Homer looks like a handsome fella.
Speaker 1: Oh god, well, and minus five for making us think
Speaker 1: of Barbara Bush's tongue.
Speaker 2: Also, yeah, man, people were stupid back then. Just this
Speaker 2: was the bread and circuses that kept us from focusing
Speaker 2: on you know, all the all the like, the encroachment
Speaker 2: of neoliberal economy that we were about to wreck our country.
Speaker 2: And this is where you fade me out. As you
Speaker 2: mentioned earlier. Matt Groening, the creator of The Simpsons, did.
Speaker 1: A panel interview alongside Seth MacFarland in a twenty fourteen
Speaker 1: issue of Entertainment Weekly. In this interview, Granny Grimmembered's initial
Speaker 1: reaction to Family Guy. He said, my first take was,
Speaker 1: oh my god, he got competition and they're out flanking us.
Speaker 1: This show is wilder and harsher and nastier. We used
Speaker 1: to get in trouble. We used to be the cause
Speaker 1: of the downfall.
Speaker 2: Of the United States. And then speaking to.
Speaker 1: MacFarlane, he said, you guys completely have your own style.
Speaker 1: At the very beginning, you were accused of copying us,
Speaker 1: and we were accused of copying you. So I stopped
Speaker 1: watching your show just because I didn't want it to
Speaker 1: be in my head. But they took this rivalry on
Speaker 1: air at certain points. It's got vicious.
Speaker 2: Yeah Yeah. The first on air shot across the Bow
Speaker 2: appeared in two thousand and two Treehouse of Horror episode
Speaker 2: on The Simpsons, the camera pans across the field of
Speaker 2: clones Homer has created with a machine, and hidden among
Speaker 2: them is Peter Griffin. Then, in the two thousand and
Speaker 2: five episode The Italian Bob, there was a gag where
Speaker 2: the Italian police leafed through a handy book of American crimes,
Speaker 2: on which the third page read Plagiardismo with a drawing
Speaker 2: of peace others were weighing in. In the final episode
Speaker 2: of Clerks, the animated series, Kevin Smith added a deliberately
Speaker 2: unfunny comedy writer character who was seen studying a book
Speaker 2: titled How to Write Cartoons by Seth MacFarlane and then
Speaker 2: pitching an extremely stupid homophobic idea. Yeah, Kevin Smith, because
Speaker 2: you've got so much to stand on. South Park took
Speaker 2: much more pointed aim at Family Guy, though, and they
Speaker 2: are two part season ten special Cartoon Wars in which
Speaker 2: Cartman attempts to get Family Guy canceled by claiming that
Speaker 2: a new episode will include a depiction of the prophet Mohammed, which,
Speaker 2: for those of you lacking context, you did not do
Speaker 2: in Islam, and that was one of the reasons for
Speaker 2: the terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie.
Speaker 1: Hebdo my correct with that? Jordan's correct? Yes, that's correct
Speaker 1: in twenty fifteen, I believe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well we'll wear an it.
Speaker 4: This isn't what I signed up for. I like Family Guy.
Speaker 4: Why do we have to get off the air forever?
Speaker 4: You should like show your sense of humor is just
Speaker 4: like Family Guy. Don't you ever ever compare me to
Speaker 4: Family Guy? You hear me, come out, compare me to
Speaker 4: Family Guy again, and so help me. I will kill
Speaker 4: you where you stand. You just want Family Guy off
Speaker 4: the air? Do you have any idea what it's sech
Speaker 4: everywhere I go? Hey, Common, you bess that Family Guy?
Speaker 4: Hey you said to human reminds me of Family Guy. Common.
Speaker 4: I am nothing like Family Guy When I make jokes
Speaker 4: there inherit to a story, deep situational and emotional jokes
Speaker 4: based on what is relevant and has a point, not
Speaker 4: just one random interchangeable.
Speaker 2: Joke after an Eventually, in the courts of this episode,
Speaker 2: it gets revealed that the Family Guy's staff writers are manatees.
Speaker 2: Using a random sentence generator controlled by idea bles that
Speaker 2: are lowered into their tank to create the show's signature
Speaker 2: cutaway gags.
Speaker 1: I love this episode so much.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's funny. Yeah, I don't know, man, I
Speaker 2: just never caught into South Park. I kind of always
Speaker 2: just felt it was, uh, it just felt like bullying.
Speaker 1: That's interesting.
Speaker 2: I don't feel that that show ever. Like their attitudes
Speaker 2: that became a parent and everything were just like, you know,
Speaker 2: like we're the smartest guys in the room. We can
Speaker 2: say this, and we can say that and whatever. And
Speaker 2: I just never I don't know. I'd be hard pressed
Speaker 2: to articulate it further than that.
Speaker 1: They're the Becker and Fagin of a turn of the
Speaker 1: century comedy misanthropes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, except I'd like to see them make you can't
Speaker 2: buy a thrill. Putts is playing around with instruction paper, Yeah,
Speaker 2: doing child's voices into their sixties. That show's still on, right.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, good for them. I don't think they're even
Speaker 1: all that old as fifty five.
Speaker 2: Okay, time is a cruel mistress. South Park show runner
Speaker 2: Trey Parker told The New York Times in two thousand
Speaker 2: and five, we kept running into people that are just like, oh,
Speaker 2: you guys do South Park. I love that show and
Speaker 2: Family Guy that's the best. You must love Family Guy,
Speaker 2: and we were like, no, we really hate Family Guy. Still,
Speaker 2: in the same interview, Matt Stone admitted they completely ignore
Speaker 2: so it's fine. It's a one way war, to which
Speaker 2: Parker then added, they're making a lot more money than
Speaker 2: we are, so I don't think they care very much.
Speaker 2: In the wake of the South Park episode, Parker claimed,
Speaker 2: when we did the Muhammed episode, we got flowers from
Speaker 2: the Simpsons people because we ripped on Family Guy. Then
Speaker 2: we got calls from the King of the Hill people
Speaker 2: saying you're doing God's work ripping on Family Guy.
Speaker 1: That's great.
Speaker 2: The worst of Family Guys responses to this was admittedly
Speaker 2: a bit much. Yeah. In the September two thousand and
Speaker 2: seven episode moving out Parentheses Brian's song, the show threw
Speaker 2: up a fake bumper ad and the lower third of
Speaker 2: the screen, which is one of those like you know
Speaker 2: they'll scroll of the lower third of the screen will
Speaker 2: have like a network animation promoting another show, and this
Speaker 2: was promoting The Simpsons featuring March As the regular episode.
Speaker 2: The Family Guy episode continues, there's an entirely separate plot
Speaker 2: happening in the lower third animation, in which Quagmire attempts
Speaker 2: and then apparently succeeds in sexually assaulting Marge, who then,
Speaker 2: apparently converted by this experience, invites him back to the
Speaker 2: Simpson house in Springfield. So then they cut away to
Speaker 2: the Simpson House entirely seen in exterior, and then the
Speaker 2: dialogue and sounds suggest that when Homer discovers them, Quagmire
Speaker 2: shoots him and then the rest of the family. There
Speaker 2: is a long pause after four of the gunshots, implying
Speaker 2: that it took him a minute, but he did indeed
Speaker 2: shoot Maggie the baby, Yes, the baby. Needless to say,
Speaker 2: this was widely decried, although McFarland defended it on the
Speaker 2: DVD commentary for the episode, calling the scene a little
Speaker 2: shot that Fox told him he couldn't do. He had
Speaker 2: that Fox was afraid of Simpson showrunner James L. Brooks,
Speaker 2: and not us.
Speaker 1: I think I read that that didn't actually make it
Speaker 1: to air, It just became I'd read that. Yeah, there
Speaker 1: were two versions of every show made, one that was
Speaker 1: broadcast and one that was for streaming in DVDs.
Speaker 2: Yes, but I mean, at this point, they didn't know
Speaker 2: that there was going to be a dB deally, so
Speaker 2: they I understand why he was angry that it had
Speaker 2: just been cut completely. And yeah, I mean it's a
Speaker 2: bit much, but it is proportional to family guys, you know. Deal.
Speaker 2: You know, of course they were going to take it
Speaker 2: somewhere that was horrifyingly dark. Yes, and you know, to
Speaker 2: me again, it's not that it's like that it was
Speaker 2: a rape joke. It was the fact that it was
Speaker 2: a rape joke that culminated in the gun murder of
Speaker 2: a chot of a baby yea, and several children. Several children. Yes, yeah, uh,
Speaker 2: you know, somebody's got to go there.
Speaker 1: But on the flip side, you've got some great facts
Speaker 1: about Quagmire.
Speaker 2: For me, I did did you know that Quagmires based
Speaker 2: on Bob Hope that I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I knew he was supposed to be like an anachronistic
Speaker 1: fifties guy, but I didn't know he was specifically Bob Hope.
Speaker 2: See. I think he was a little bit supposed to
Speaker 2: be more of like a seventies swinger, like an eg
Speaker 2: Bob Hope character, you know. But I think that large
Speaker 2: jaw is probably the most identifiable part of that.
Speaker 1: An episode where Peter and his friends get a look
Speaker 1: at Quiguire's driver's license. He apparently was born in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eight, which means that he's like pushing eighty. That's weird,
Speaker 1: and the secret to his youthful appearance carrots. He said,
Speaker 1: some of the ways you can expect and some of
Speaker 1: the ways that you could also expect because it's Family Guy.
Speaker 2: Eventually, the Simpsons Family Guy crossed over to a full
Speaker 2: on crossover special in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: I had no memory of this. I thought it would
Speaker 1: have been a bigger news story.
Speaker 2: Oh, I definitely had stopped watching any of this stuff
Speaker 2: by then. What was I doing in twenty fourteen, I
Speaker 2: was playing a lot of shows. I don't think I
Speaker 2: was watching any I mean this is I didn't have
Speaker 2: a TV. I stopped having a TV when I moved
Speaker 2: to New York, you know. And I wasn't spending a
Speaker 2: lot of time watching streaming unless I passed out in
Speaker 2: front of it. Simpsons writer Mike Rice thought that Matt
Speaker 2: Groening and James L. Brooks would want more control over
Speaker 2: the episode, but the pair told the Family Guy team
Speaker 2: good luck with the crossover. We'll watch it when it airs.
Speaker 2: Rice added in the end, everyone from both camps loved it,
Speaker 2: except for maybe Seth McFarlane. The running theme of the
Speaker 2: episode was that Family Guy stole everything from The Simpsons,
Speaker 2: and they made this point over and over and over
Speaker 2: and over. Apparently at some point Seth told the staff
Speaker 2: guys enough On the flip side, you know Seth's favorite
Speaker 2: Family Guy bit. I remember this bit seeing it written out.
Speaker 1: It's when Lois looks back on all the food they've wasted,
Speaker 1: and they cut to Peter trying to feed Tom Selick
Speaker 1: peas from a spoon through the TV screen and.
Speaker 2: When it changes characters.
Speaker 1: None for you, Higgins, you had yours?
Speaker 2: Hey, Hey, none for you Higgins trying to steal time
Speaker 2: Shalick food.
Speaker 1: No, No, you've had yours. We don't have time to
Speaker 1: touch on literally every time someone said Family Guy went
Speaker 1: too far. This joke's about Terry Schivo, Sarah Palin's sung trig, transphobe, homophobia,
Speaker 1: domestic violence, the Boston Marathon bombing.
Speaker 2: What have you, and the rest and the but I well.
Speaker 1: Heigel want to highlight how furious the right wing TV
Speaker 1: morality group, the Parents Television Council war at Family Guy.
Speaker 1: In May two thousand, in an email, the Parents Television
Speaker 1: Council launched a letter writing campaign to the Fox network
Speaker 1: to persuade the network to cancel Family Guy. This is
Speaker 1: before it was canceled the first time. Family Guy made
Speaker 1: the PTCs two thousand, two thousand and five, and two
Speaker 1: thousand and six lists of worst primetime shows for family viewing,
Speaker 1: with over forty Family Guy episodes listed as worst TV
Speaker 1: shows of the week. I think forty four to be exact,
Speaker 1: which is a record for the watchdog Agency. This was
Speaker 1: due to profanity, animated nudity, and violence, and the series
Speaker 1: was also named the worst show of the two thousand
Speaker 1: and six two thousand and seven season by the PTC.
Speaker 1: They all filed multiple complaints, but the FCC that's kind
Speaker 1: of the thing that the PTC does.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: For the show's one hundredth episode special seth MacFarland interviewed
Speaker 1: people who hated Family Guy, hiding the fact that they
Speaker 1: were speaking to the show's creator. I kind of remember this.
Speaker 1: Representatives from the PTC were among those interviewed. But here's
Speaker 1: the craziest thing about the relationship between the PTC and
Speaker 1: Family Guy, though McFarland once slammed the PTC as quote
Speaker 1: literally terrible human beings rotten to the core, but in
Speaker 1: twenty fifteen he invited PTC president Tim Winter to talk
Speaker 1: things out.
Speaker 2: Winter took over as president in two thousand and seven,
Speaker 2: and after a twenty fifteen episode of Family Guy featuring
Speaker 2: one of the stupidest jokes ever to grace the show,
Speaker 2: and this is the joke, Peter had surgery because he
Speaker 2: wanted to have quote two wieners. He lifts his hospital
Speaker 2: gown after the operation, swivels his hips with his back
Speaker 2: to the and everything covered by the backside of the gown.
Speaker 2: Viewers here and Peter remarks, uh, oh, that was the original.
Speaker 1: I don't get it.
Speaker 2: He's original wiener Ye. Another one added. The joke is
Speaker 2: that instead of the new one, the original fell off.
Speaker 2: Oh that's oh.
Speaker 1: Oh. I thought it was the sound of them bumping
Speaker 1: into one another and I didn't get it.
Speaker 2: No, sorry, Yeah, there's a sound of something thunking on
Speaker 2: the floor. I could have sold that. Let me just
Speaker 2: take that whole thing over again. It's kind of funny
Speaker 2: that you're explaining this joke to me. Okay, I'm going
Speaker 2: to keep that. So after that, McFarlane wrote a letter
Speaker 2: to Winter inviting him or two writers of Winter's choosing
Speaker 2: to quote write an episode of Family Guy the way
Speaker 2: you think Family Guys should be written.
Speaker 1: That's an incredible challenge, Yeah, it is. Winsor ultimately declined
Speaker 1: the offer, but wrote back to McFarlane explaining that the
Speaker 1: PTC's goal was to raise awareness about how some subject
Speaker 1: matter may be harmful the children, and pointed to at
Speaker 1: least fifty eight jokes about sexual violence on Family Guy
Speaker 1: in three years don't last, asking McFarland, what is the
Speaker 1: cumulative impact on children who watched those programs?
Speaker 2: Probably less than being sexually abused. Whatever, Sorry, McFarland told
Speaker 2: the La Times.
Speaker 1: I was properly humbled, and I figured that I ought
Speaker 1: to give him a call. The pair met and sat
Speaker 1: and talked about media.
Speaker 2: It's like you and me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, McFarlane told Winter that quote, my parents let me
Speaker 1: watch Animal House, Caddyshack, Stripes, these R rated comedies when
Speaker 1: I was seven. I had a very strong family unit,
Speaker 1: and so there wasn't much damage that was done from
Speaker 1: those films. But when your kids being raised by TV,
Speaker 1: it could be a different story and The two eventually
Speaker 1: hit it off so well that in twenty nineteen, when
Speaker 1: The La Times cover the story, the pair were.
Speaker 2: On a texting basis with each other.
Speaker 1: McFarlane told the paper for this interview, I think it's
Speaker 1: a healthy, necessary thing for the PTC to exist in
Speaker 1: the same world as what we're doing. And also apparently
Speaker 1: the PTC loved McFarland's Star Trek parody The Orville, and
Speaker 1: instead of urging advertisers to boycott the show, as they
Speaker 1: had done with Family Guy, they encouraged advertisers to buy
Speaker 1: space on the rival show. Also in twenty nineteen, McFarland,
Speaker 1: along with executive producers Alex Sulkin and Rich Appel, made
Speaker 1: an announcement that the show would begin refraining from gay jokes.
Speaker 2: It took that long, Yeah, so some progress. It's hey,
Speaker 2: it's a marathon, not a sprint, right, What is progress anyway?
Speaker 2: I've heard all these stories about it, but I don't
Speaker 2: really see a lot of it. Time will tell if
Speaker 2: McFarlane will have a similar moment of accord with Jana
Speaker 2: Lana Trova, a regional deputy for the Russian city of Cheliabinsk,
Speaker 2: who criticized Family Guys season twenty one finale, for as
Speaker 2: Wikipedia hopefully puts it negatively, portraying the city as contaminated
Speaker 2: by radiation and its local citizens as drunkards and drug
Speaker 2: users dissatisfied with life. Family Guys first two at bats
Speaker 2: on the air worked put it charitably, mismanaged. It official
Speaker 2: premiered after Fox's broadcast of Super Bowl XXXIII on January
Speaker 2: thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, too, as we mentioned earlier,
Speaker 2: twenty two million viewers, but then it wouldn't return to
Speaker 2: the air until four months later. That's insane, amazing idea.
Speaker 2: Make space for this after the fucking Super Bowl and
Speaker 2: then wait four months to let anybody see it again.
Speaker 2: But Fox did slot it between The Simpsons and The
Speaker 2: X Files and the networks then flourishing Sunday night lineup.
Speaker 2: After its first season, as you mentioned, it was ranked
Speaker 2: thirty third by Nielsen with nearly thirteen million viewers by
Speaker 2: Harry Nielsen, Yes, by beloved kruner Harry Nielsen. Unfortunately, Fox
Speaker 2: decided to move it to Thursdays at nine for its
Speaker 2: second season, which put it indirect competition to Fraser, which,
Speaker 2: as the elder among you may remember, was not a
Speaker 2: smart move. At the turn of the century. Fox's response
Speaker 2: to this was to remove Family Guy from its schedule
Speaker 2: and then just start airing episodes irregularly. Then, a year
Speaker 2: after its premiere, they moved it to Tuesdays in March
Speaker 2: of two thousand, where it was then in place to
Speaker 2: be walloped by the juggernaut of Who Wants to Be
Speaker 2: a Millionaire, which was reaching its critical mass at the time.
Speaker 2: Based on that, Fox announced Family Guys first cancelation in
Speaker 2: May of two thousand at the end of its second season,
Speaker 2: before abruptly announcing in July that they'd actually ordered thirteen
Speaker 2: more episodes for a third season. Of course, Fox decided
Speaker 2: to bring the show back in November of two thousand
Speaker 2: and one on Thursdays at eight, bringing it into direct
Speaker 2: competition again with NBC and ABC, who were at the
Speaker 2: time airing Survivor and Friends respectively in the same time slot.
Speaker 2: Just like literally the sideshow Bob gag of stepping on rakes,
Speaker 2: Like stop putting a show that people have only had
Speaker 2: a little love against these ratings juggernauts man. Anyway, Fox
Speaker 2: continued to toy with the show scheduling during its third season,
Speaker 2: moving it around to different time slots with little or
Speaker 2: no notice. I think there was like a brief website
Speaker 2: at one point that was like when you can see
Speaker 2: Family guardments, yes, and that just had the expected effect
Speaker 2: of tanking its ratings. And then when it came time
Speaker 2: to unveil its two thousand and two fall lineup, Family
Speaker 2: Guy was noticeably absent, with the network announcing the show
Speaker 2: had been canceled. Days later.
Speaker 1: They did the same thing the rest of the development
Speaker 1: like around the same time. Well, it's not that hard, no.
Speaker 2: No, yeah. McFarlane though, I think is quite sweet about it.
Speaker 2: He said it wasn't He didn't blame it on Fox.
Speaker 2: He said it was an issue of overconfidence. They felt
Speaker 2: that because the show was doing so well on Sunday
Speaker 2: nights after the Simpsons, that it could do well anywhere.
Speaker 2: Obviously that wasn't the case. But really, to their cred
Speaker 2: despite all the scheduling problems, the fact that they did
Speaker 2: stick with it after that up to fifty episodes. As
Speaker 2: much as they're maligned by fans for misscheduling us, they
Speaker 2: really did like the show and there was a lot
Speaker 2: of support for it.
Speaker 1: Family Guy ultimately earned its historic comeback thanks to Cartoon Network,
Speaker 1: who picked up the rights to the show Dirt Cheap
Speaker 1: and began airing reruns of it during their late night
Speaker 1: Adult Swim programming block.
Speaker 2: Dude, if I had a time machine, man, I would
Speaker 2: just go back to watching Adult Swim just being high
Speaker 2: Maneah twelve ounce mouse.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's never a big aquatine. That was never really
Speaker 1: my thing.
Speaker 2: Oh I liked aquatine? Yeah I did. I'm not ashamed
Speaker 2: to admit it. I'm not. I don't let him tell
Speaker 2: me what to do.
Speaker 1: What else is on at that time?
Speaker 2: Did you pick that up?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: This is one of my favorite random bits from Arrested Development,
Speaker 2: where Jeffrey Tamber has been locked in the attic and
Speaker 2: Jason Babman finds him having a tea party with like
Speaker 2: the dolls they've been left up in it, and he
Speaker 2: says something. He's like, he's like rambling on an advice
Speaker 2: and he's like, you know, Michael, you just you're too
Speaker 2: enthrall to these women, Like with these broads here, you know,
Speaker 2: I whine them and I dine them, but I don't
Speaker 2: let them tell them what to do. Pause. I don't
Speaker 2: let them tell me what to do. It looks back,
Speaker 2: so good.
Speaker 1: I do.
Speaker 2: Rest of it.
Speaker 1: I thought we've talked about this and you said you
Speaker 1: weren't into rest of the development because you thought it
Speaker 1: was a little too like nudge nudge, wink wink with
Speaker 1: the audience.
Speaker 2: I do think that as a criticism, but I also
Speaker 2: think it's one of the Uh. I think it's up
Speaker 2: there with thirty Rock and like prime era cheers as
Speaker 2: like laughs per capita. Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. You
Speaker 2: don't agree though, because you still haven't watched thirty Rock.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, because you have, you're still salty about it
Speaker 2: from oh my gosh, that's becoming a theme this episode.
Speaker 2: From your time at NYU in the screenwriting program, Well
Speaker 2: it was this.
Speaker 1: They made us like dissect scripts from it. And it's
Speaker 1: just because they're funny as well. Sure, but it's just
Speaker 1: if there's a way to make something not funny, it's
Speaker 1: to just forensically examine it.
Speaker 2: Suddenly it became homeworks as we do. Okay, that's that's fair. Continue.
Speaker 2: I don't know point I was making.
Speaker 1: These family got reruns on Adult Swim, a basic cable network,
Speaker 1: end up beating both David Letterman and Jay Leno's late
Speaker 1: night shows on CBS and NBC. Among the coveted eighteen
Speaker 1: to thirty four demo. Not surprised about Jay Leno. I'm
Speaker 1: surprised about Letterman.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Letterman was always the guy that they could count
Speaker 2: on for the younger demographic. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The Family Got reruns also provided a staggering two hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty nine percent boost the Cartoon Network's ratings. That's insane.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what must have been the reaction when those figures
Speaker 2: came in other than like are these right? Yeah? I
Speaker 2: mean two hundred and thirty nine percent They earned their
Speaker 2: bonuses that year.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think about, like what I would have
Speaker 1: watched on Cartoon Network.
Speaker 2: I mean maybe it was like Flip Bravo. It would
Speaker 2: have been Johnny Bravo, and they had a slate, they
Speaker 2: had a slate before that, but Adult Swim was just totally,
Speaker 2: you know, unprecedented and like unexplained too. I just remember
Speaker 2: like surfing around and like the logo would come up
Speaker 2: with the little cool music stingers, and I would just
Speaker 2: be like is this And then like Family Guy would
Speaker 2: come on, or Twelve Ounce Mouths would come on, or
Speaker 2: any of those shows, and I remember being so captivated
Speaker 2: in the staying up to watch that like every summer
Speaker 2: really because they you know, anyway, I digress. This isn't
Speaker 2: about my childhood, Jordan, It's about yours.
Speaker 1: But it was weird. It was like the network aged
Speaker 1: up with us, Like it started when we were kids
Speaker 1: and aired relatively kid friendly shows in my memory at least,
Speaker 1: and then as we hit like late middle school, early
Speaker 1: high school, it started skewing a little older. It was funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I haven't delved super into the history
Speaker 2: of adult Swim, but I think it really was just
Speaker 2: kind of a like pie in the Sky thing where
Speaker 2: they were like, I don't know, most of our audience
Speaker 2: doesn't stay awake this late. Does anyone here want to
Speaker 2: try and do something with this? And that's what happened.
Speaker 1: It's probably like what's Snick was for Nickelodeon when they
Speaker 1: had kind of the more older skewing are you Afraid
Speaker 1: of the Dark type stuff?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, but Snick didn't have Aquitine Hunger Force where
Speaker 2: Danzig shows up, or like twelve ounce Mouse where it's
Speaker 2: like a paper mache mouse who's also like a violent
Speaker 2: mercenary for hire. I mean, stuff was really out there.
Speaker 2: It was mecapse on the old Swim it was, but
Speaker 2: that was a little later. Yeah, okay, yeah is also great?
Speaker 1: Yes? Is that?
Speaker 2: Then't say Tom the Satanic Priest is droning on and
Speaker 2: on and on and on and totally monotone, and then
Speaker 2: Nail sating. I just think there's there's a hilarious moment.
Speaker 2: You have to cut all this because this is not
Speaker 2: making it tear. I don't I don't want to be
Speaker 2: part of something. It's just two guys talking about bits
Speaker 2: from shows. But I'm gonna cut it right there.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be
Speaker 1: right back with more too much information in just a moment.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So simultaneously with this phenomenal performance on Cartoon Networks Adult
Speaker 1: Swim Fox released Family Guy on DVD with its first
Speaker 1: box set.
Speaker 2: I imagine the first season.
Speaker 1: Coming in only behind The Simpsons and Chappelle's Show in
Speaker 1: sales for all time.
Speaker 2: That's wacky.
Speaker 1: That record still I mean, of course the record still
Speaker 1: holds because we're streaming it. Record is never gonna be broken.
Speaker 2: I'm not sure if it did, it might have something
Speaker 2: else might have squeaked in, but they were certainly on
Speaker 2: the tail end of the era to amass such a record. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and to be like, man, I mean like do you remember,
Speaker 2: how do you actually remember how huge Chappelle show was? Yeah,
Speaker 2: to come in second to that, like yeah, wild for
Speaker 2: a show that you know, Fox canceled Idiots.
Speaker 1: It is funny to me how the things that were
Speaker 1: huge at a given time in history. I was talking
Speaker 1: about this with my dad not too long ago, that
Speaker 1: are still remembered as huge, you know, Beatles, pet sound like,
Speaker 1: the things that are all those classics, and then the
Speaker 1: things that were huge at the time but then just
Speaker 1: didn't make it through and we're just kind of memory hold.
Speaker 1: I feel like Chappelle's show, people don't well. I mean
Speaker 1: I know that there's a lot of yeah, he did.
Speaker 2: A lot about himself. Yeah, but I know, I think
Speaker 2: it's just that everything once it's really that you can
Speaker 2: trace that to the Internet, I think, because it's it's
Speaker 2: you know, things got so much more fragmented and people
Speaker 2: just stopped depending on like the big studios to like
Speaker 2: dictate what movies were going to be big or like
Speaker 2: what shows to watch, and it just I think like
Speaker 2: that was like early dial up, you know, Internet message
Speaker 2: boards and fan clubs were like the end of the
Speaker 2: monoculture more than the speed of the Internet was or anything,
Speaker 2: because it was just like something could have made ten
Speaker 2: million dollars, like however many million dollars at the box office,
Speaker 2: like had a huge smash hit, like all of these
Speaker 2: like small legal dramas or stuff that movies that you
Speaker 2: don't remember from the early nineties that were massive financial hits.
Speaker 2: And then just because they didn't get a foothold in
Speaker 2: the Internet community from the nascent Internet community and then
Speaker 2: subsequently social media. Uh, that's it their memory. Hold, it's crazy.
Speaker 2: I mean, if you look up box office stats for like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, let's uh, let's pick a random or
Speaker 2: in the nineties box office ninety nine, give it a
Speaker 2: ninety nine. No, I want to do something earlier before.
Speaker 2: I want to do pre Jurassic Park. I wanna say
Speaker 2: ninety two, which I think was the year of Terminator two.
Speaker 2: But yeah, well, Sister Act was the third highest grossing
Speaker 2: movie that year, which, like, I think Sister Act has
Speaker 2: been a little bit memory. Hold the Hand that Rocks
Speaker 2: the Cradle, how about that eighty eight million domestic number
Speaker 2: nine at the year end list? Remember anything about that? No,
Speaker 2: Hand the rocks Creole guess what was number ten? No
Speaker 2: idea Steven Siegal's Undersea rem there anything about that.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's got Steven Skall. That's all I need
Speaker 1: to know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Fried Green Tomatoes. Oh, that's something called Far and Away.
Speaker 1: Nope.
Speaker 2: Fifty eight mil domestic?
Speaker 1: What are the top five? I mean I've seen in
Speaker 1: the top five?
Speaker 2: Oh, Batman Returns with a Weapon, three Sister Act Home Alone,
Speaker 2: two and Wayne's World. Yeah, I mean ninety two? The
Speaker 2: second ninety two. The Fugitive made one hundred and seventy
Speaker 2: six million dollars. Does anyone remember The Fugitive other than
Speaker 2: John mulaney making a joke about how convoluted the plot
Speaker 2: of this Fugitive actually is. Oh, I thought, Oh, here's
Speaker 2: a better one. Number three The Firm, Oh was talking
Speaker 2: about the Firm? Wow, that movie made one hundred and
Speaker 2: fifty eight million dollars in the United States in nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety three. Who's talking about the Firm? Indecent Proposal one
Speaker 2: hundred and six million? Yeah, people do they? Yeah? In
Speaker 2: the Line of Fire starring Clint Eastwood, one hundred two million.
Speaker 2: This is some sick com Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think it was a succession where the brother says
Speaker 1: something that was like, I'm going to make you an
Speaker 1: indecent proposal, and she's like, you've definitely ever seen that movie?
Speaker 2: Have you? Okay, sorry, let's get this back on track.
Speaker 1: Let's get it back on track with Steve Feldstein. Steve
Speaker 1: Feldstein will get a SAT name with Steve. He was
Speaker 1: the then senior VP of Fox's Home Entertainment. He told
Speaker 1: The New York Times, once we made DVDs available Family Guy,
Speaker 1: the response was incredible. Were we surprised about the response.
Speaker 1: I'd be lying if I said no. The DVD sales,
Speaker 1: he added, led the network to take a second look
Speaker 1: at the show. Yeah, No, were there any like actual
Speaker 1: stats for numbers of like how much they sold in
Speaker 1: that period?
Speaker 2: Oh, sales of the DVD set reached two point two
Speaker 2: million copies.
Speaker 1: That's nuts, That is nuts. And they were like, what
Speaker 1: forty bucks apiece?
Speaker 2: Probably around maybe something like that. Yeah. Wow, So like, okay,
Speaker 2: almost one hundred million in DVD sales. That'll make you
Speaker 2: take a second look at to show you canceled.
Speaker 1: Yeah. McFarland told The La Times that he took Family
Speaker 1: Guy's entire early struggle in stride, mostly out of lack
Speaker 1: of experience, He said, I had nothing to compare it
Speaker 1: to because it was the first show I'd ever pitched
Speaker 1: and it got picked up. I thought, oh, I guess
Speaker 1: this is normal, which it certainly is not. When it
Speaker 1: got canceled, I was like, Okay, well I guess this.
Speaker 2: Is normal too.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't like they were kicking to the curb.
Speaker 1: It was we still want to be in business with you.
Speaker 1: My deal with twentieth Television Animation never expired over those
Speaker 1: two years. It was about to expire, and then they
Speaker 1: picked the show up again. McFarlane went into further detail
Speaker 1: about the moment that he learned the show as resurrected
Speaker 1: in an interview with IGN. He said, they literally called
Speaker 1: me out of nowhere. The head of twentieth called me
Speaker 1: to come into his office for a meeting, and I
Speaker 1: didn't know what it was about, and he just kind
Speaker 1: of threw it on the table. We're thinking about putting
Speaker 1: this thing back in the production and I just about
Speaker 1: fell out of my chair. I thought that maybe we
Speaker 1: get a chance to do a special or a direct
Speaker 1: DVD movie of some kind, But as far as new episodes,
Speaker 1: there was no precedent. It had never happened, mainly because
Speaker 1: it requires a network to say, Okay, we screwed up.
Speaker 1: Fox deserves some credit for saying, you know, we canceled it,
Speaker 1: but now we see it's making some money, so we
Speaker 1: want that money.
Speaker 2: I do love that quote.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I remember when it was announced. I remember that
Speaker 1: was like a big deal.
Speaker 2: I don't think I remember when it happened. I just
Speaker 2: remember like reappearing. So I don't know. I didn't have
Speaker 2: I wasn't part of the letter writing campaigns. I didn't
Speaker 2: care about I didn't care about anything that much.
Speaker 1: So I wasn't part of that either. But I remember
Speaker 1: what it was announced. I was like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is great.
Speaker 2: It was great.
Speaker 1: It was great, and what a time. It was a
Speaker 1: time of innocence, a time of confidences.
Speaker 2: Long ago.
Speaker 1: It must be are you just ripping? No, it's it's bookends.
Speaker 1: It's my favorite Simon A. Garfunkle song.
Speaker 2: Oh you so ach got me got his ass? Whose gas?
Speaker 2: We got our Garfuncle dude. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Fox ended up ordering thirty five new episodes of Family
Speaker 1: Guy in May two thousand and four, making the show
Speaker 1: the first to have been brought back by DVD.
Speaker 2: Sales and likely the last Yeah Oh Yeah.
Speaker 1: DVD sales were not the only measure, though, there was
Speaker 1: a robust fan campaign to bring the show back that
Speaker 1: even picked up notice overseas. The Guardian, which is based
Speaker 1: in the UK, remarked on the situation in two.
Speaker 2: Thousand and five.
Speaker 1: Protests involved over one hundred thousand signing a petition promising
Speaker 1: to boycott all Fox TV and every product They advertised
Speaker 1: nearly bankrupting a business by sending diapers and some less
Speaker 1: than subtle letters.
Speaker 2: It was they nearly bankrupted the diaper business, to be fair,
Speaker 2: because they were like sending so many to headquarters to
Speaker 2: Fox at one point, why were they sending diapers because
Speaker 2: of Stewie? Oh you fool?
Speaker 1: Oh okay, that's good, that's medium funny. McFarlane told the paper.
Speaker 1: It was the largest fan campaign anyone had ever seen.
Speaker 1: Funnily enough. Neil Goldman, who went on to executive produced Community,
Speaker 1: another show brought back by extensive fan action, was working
Speaker 1: on Family Guy during the campaign and recalled Fox gradually
Speaker 1: becoming annoyed by the cases.
Speaker 2: Of diapers mailed to the studio.
Speaker 1: And added that even the online diaper company was asking
Speaker 1: people to stop.
Speaker 2: And that's what the problem was was because there were
Speaker 2: not that many places doing online delivery at in this era, right,
Speaker 2: so they were like they found like one place that
Speaker 2: they could game so that it wouldn't come back to
Speaker 2: them and like use anonymous stuff. And the company was like, please,
Speaker 2: these aren't being accepted and we can't keep up with demand,
Speaker 2: Like stop doing this.
Speaker 1: That's amazing. I've never heard that.
Speaker 2: The show naturally commented on the cancelation in North by
Speaker 2: North Cohog the first episode of its revival. I remember
Speaker 2: this gag, and I remember it being hilarious. Yes, Peter
Speaker 2: breaks the fourth wall by explaining to Hi his family
Speaker 2: that their show is back, but that Fox had to
Speaker 2: cancel them in order to make room for Dark Angel,
Speaker 2: Titus Undeclared Action, That eighty Show, wonderfulse fast Lane, Andy
Speaker 2: Richter controls the Universe, Skin Girls Club, Cracking Up the Pits, Firefly,
Speaker 2: Get Real, Freaky Links, Wanda at Large, Costello, The Lone Gunman,
Speaker 2: A Minute with Stan Hooper, Normal Ohio, Pasadena, A Harsh
Speaker 2: realm Keen, Eddie the Street, The American Embassy, Cedric the
Speaker 2: Entertainer Presents the Tick, Luis and Greg the Bunny, all
Speaker 2: of which were canceled during Family Guy's brief hiatus. That
Speaker 2: was good.
Speaker 1: I do remember that.
Speaker 2: Family Guy, however, was not invincible upon its triumphant return.
Speaker 2: In a number of cases, celebrities whose works have been
Speaker 2: the topic of the show's many cutaway gags have sued,
Speaker 2: like Carol Burnett. I didn't know about this. I guess.
Speaker 1: There's an episode with a scene where Peter and his
Speaker 1: friends visit an adult book store and Peter has concerns
Speaker 1: that the store will be dirty, but then Quagmire says
Speaker 1: it's pretty clean. Carol Burnett works part time as a janitor,
Speaker 1: and the camera pans to a cartoon version of Carol
Speaker 1: Burnett in one of her best known roles, mopping the
Speaker 1: floor as her character the Charwoman. Actually it's funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it was just just named the charge
Speaker 2: Woman Charwoman.
Speaker 1: Since Family Guy did not get Carol Burnett's permission, she
Speaker 1: sued twentieth Century Fox for two million dollars on copyright
Speaker 1: infringement claims.
Speaker 2: The lawsuit also.
Speaker 1: Alleged that the TV show used an altered version of
Speaker 1: the Carol Burnett Show theme.
Speaker 2: Song, which it probably did to set off the gag. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but that's not all that is not all Jordan Police
Speaker 2: Academy actor Art Mitrano sure also sued over a scene
Speaker 2: in which Jesus, like the Son of God, mimics Mitronto's
Speaker 2: bit of performing magic while humming Fine and Dandy from
Speaker 2: the nineteen thirty musical of the same name. Burnett's was
Speaker 2: rejected right when the judge.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this case was tossed out.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Burnett's case was talked out while Mitranto's was
Speaker 2: settled out of court. I don't know anything about that
Speaker 2: guy's bit, but it is a case when the gag
Speaker 2: got too specific.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, he's like doing some lame magic thing with
Speaker 1: like his fingers and now I remember it.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, okay, okay. But the show had moments that
Speaker 2: Fox didn't back in court or anywhere else too. When
Speaker 2: You Wish Upon a Weinstein, that was an episode that
Speaker 2: succeeded in getting under Fox's skin. In the episode, Peter,
Speaker 2: desponding over his money problems, praised for a Jewish person
Speaker 2: to come and help him. He becomes friends with the
Speaker 2: wildly caricatured Jewish man Max Weinstein or Max Goldman? Did
Speaker 2: Max Goldman or Max Weinstein? I thought it changes? I
Speaker 2: guess it's Weinstein.
Speaker 1: The name of the show is when You Wish upon
Speaker 1: a Wine Stea.
Speaker 2: I remember that he becomes friends with the wildly chricatured
Speaker 2: Jewish Max Weinstein and then attempts to convert Chris to
Speaker 2: Judaism when he sees how successful Max is. Fox executives
Speaker 2: initially stopped it from airing in two thousand, but it
Speaker 2: was broadcast on Cartoon Network in two thousand and three,
Speaker 2: and then after the network could see it wasn't that
Speaker 2: big of a deal, it aired on Fox in two
Speaker 2: thousand and four. Funnily enough, during Hanukkah. On the DVD extras,
Speaker 2: there's a commentary track to this episode, featuring various crew members,
Speaker 2: writer Ricky Blitt, and director Dan Povenmeier among them. I
Speaker 2: found an article that was written about at the same
Speaker 2: time as this that cited comments from that commentary track
Speaker 2: without naming who said them. One, there's a few people
Speaker 2: at business affairs at Fox who should absolutely be ashamed
Speaker 2: of themselves, and I found it offensive. We could make
Speaker 2: fun of every ethnic group but one which we've sure
Speaker 2: learned that over the past couple of years, haven't we.
Speaker 2: Also in the commentary, someone notes that seventy percent of
Speaker 2: the show's writers are Jewish anyway. That episode also contained
Speaker 2: a song I Need a Jew that used the melody
Speaker 2: to when You Wish Upon a Star. A few years later,
Speaker 2: in October two thousand and seven, the Born Company publishing house,
Speaker 2: the sole owners of the copyright too when You Wish
Speaker 2: Upon a Star, fired a lawsuit against several Fox Divisions,
Speaker 2: cartoon network, McFarland's company, Fuzzy Door Productions, McFarland himself, and
Speaker 2: composer Walter Murphy, claiming copyright infringement over the song, seeking
Speaker 2: unspecified damages and to halt the program's distribution, claiming that
Speaker 2: the offensive nature of the parody damaged their song's potential earnings.
Speaker 2: The case dragged on for eighteen months before a judge
Speaker 2: ruled that it was protected by a parody and that
Speaker 2: there was no copyright infringement, So suck on that the
Speaker 2: Born Company.
Speaker 1: However, there is one Family Guy episode that still isn't available.
Speaker 1: I didn't know this until reading this.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's probably it's out there. It's out there
Speaker 2: on the internet, but not officially.
Speaker 1: The intended season eighth finale partial Terms of Endearment, which, yeah,
Speaker 1: as some of you may have Guessed is about abortion
Speaker 1: and contains frank discussion.
Speaker 2: And jokes about such.
Speaker 1: Owing to this, the episode was never aired on either
Speaker 1: Fox or Cartoon Network, wasn't put on the season eight
Speaker 1: box set, and isn't available to stream on Hulu. It
Speaker 1: is apparently for sale on Amazon Prime, however, as part
Speaker 1: of a Family Guy package, and was aired in the
Speaker 1: UK in June twenty ten. Then Fox Entertainment president Kevin
Speaker 1: Riley told The New York Times that unsurprisingly, the decision
Speaker 1: came down to money. It's an extremely fragile subject matter
Speaker 1: at an extremely fragile economic time, Riley said, of all
Speaker 1: the issues, this is the one that seems to be
Speaker 1: the most of a hot button, particularly at that moment
Speaker 1: in time. The economy was really struggling and there were
Speaker 1: a lot of very tough conversations going on with clients.
Speaker 1: Riley continued, it's very hard on the Family Guy's scale
Speaker 1: to say this one was more offensive than anything else
Speaker 1: they tackled, while allowing that he thought the subject was
Speaker 1: quote handled well, but quote one felt like it could
Speaker 1: cause trouble and it was just not worth it. The
Speaker 1: episode's writer, Danny Smith, also told The Times that the
Speaker 1: script didn't make waves among the admittedly mostly male right.
Speaker 1: He said, we've had more spirited debates about whether or
Speaker 1: not we should state whether Santa Claus is real.
Speaker 2: I read that they did a table read of this
Speaker 2: once it got shut down, and that it was well
Speaker 2: received at the table read when wherever they did it with,
Speaker 2: you know, I guess it passed some audience's smell test.
Speaker 2: But do they have audiences for table reads? They do
Speaker 2: them well, they'll do them, they'll do them sometimes they'll
Speaker 2: do them as an event. But it was during COVID
Speaker 2: when it started just being like a virtual thing that
Speaker 2: people did because it wasn't a table read for like
Speaker 2: rehearsing it. Do you want to come to see the
Speaker 2: Family Guy cast do a table read of this episode?
Speaker 2: I would like to see that. That'd be cool. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that would be fun for me.
Speaker 1: But Farland also gave an eerily prescient quote in that
Speaker 1: aforementioned New York Times article saying people in America they're
Speaker 1: getting dumber. They're getting less and less able to analyze
Speaker 1: something and think critically and pick apart the underlying elements,
Speaker 1: and more and more ready to make a snap judge
Speaker 1: regarding something at face value, which is too bad. You
Speaker 1: really see, you know, his love of Archie Bunker and
Speaker 1: all in the family. In something like this where you
Speaker 1: wouldn't be able to have a character who says a
Speaker 1: bad thing on air, even though the character is saying
Speaker 1: the bad thing, is meant to demonstrate how ridiculous his
Speaker 1: beliefs are. The fact that he said the bad thing
Speaker 1: on air.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's part of what I've heard. I saw
Speaker 2: to get termed depiction as endorsement, oh, which is like
Speaker 2: become a watchword lately because apparently, like the Zoomers, there's
Speaker 2: all these people who get super angry on Twitter when
Speaker 2: like they're like, you expect me to watch this movie
Speaker 2: where this character does this, this and this, and it's like, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's a movie, the character is a bad person. It's
Speaker 2: not really actually happening, you know. So this idea of
Speaker 2: like just because it's depicted, it's offensive and terrible, where
Speaker 2: it's like you're completely ignoring the point that the movie
Speaker 2: is trying to make about either the character or the issue.
Speaker 2: But I thought that was just put rather succinctly. I
Speaker 2: liked it. Depiction endorsement by depiction.
Speaker 1: I like that. I never heard that.
Speaker 2: Well, now put on to a lighter subject.
Speaker 1: Yes, nine to eleven.
Speaker 2: What is it and what can it do for you?
Speaker 2: You better keep that one.
Speaker 1: We're about to get to a fairly well known bit
Speaker 1: of law about Seth MacFarlane on September eleventh, two thousand
Speaker 1: and one, who's booked to fly from Boston to Los
Speaker 1: Angeles on American Airlines Flight eleven, but it's travel agent
Speaker 1: had mistakenly told him that the flight left at eight
Speaker 1: fifteen and not seven forty five. He talks about this
Speaker 1: a lot, pretty much, everyone asks us about this. Here's
Speaker 1: what he told MPR. I'm a perpetually late person. In
Speaker 1: every flight that takes off, you have to figure that
Speaker 1: somebody's going to miss the flight or somebody's late. And
Speaker 1: on top of that, who knows how many times a
Speaker 1: day we've had similar close calls? Is the one I
Speaker 1: had this morning crossing the street. If I'd cross five
Speaker 1: minutes later, I would have been hit by a car.
Speaker 2: Who knows so?
Speaker 1: In my case, obviously the day itself was a tragedy
Speaker 1: in a disaster. But if we're just talking about my case,
Speaker 1: it doesn't strike me as something that I'm attaching an
Speaker 1: unbelievable amount of significance to because of those reasons, because
Speaker 1: I missed a bunch of flights, I disagree in this scenario,
Speaker 1: that would stick with me.
Speaker 2: Well, Jordan, maybe one day you failed to make a
Speaker 2: flight that'll be hijacked and then we'll see how you feel.
Speaker 2: Can anyone do that, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie can arrange it.
Speaker 2: Can we arrange that for Jordan?
Speaker 1: I can tell you right now that would that would
Speaker 1: stick with me. Well, I told you the story about
Speaker 1: my aunt.
Speaker 2: Right. You're telling a lot of stories on this episode,
Speaker 2: so I know.
Speaker 1: I'm sorry everybody. I know we've got I.
Speaker 2: Think you should tell the story about when the plane
Speaker 2: you were on started to go down.
Speaker 1: Oh that was bad. I've told that story. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I wrote I wrote a love note on an airsickness
Speaker 1: bag to a girl I like the time. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was bad.
Speaker 2: It was more about the guy next to you who
Speaker 2: grabbed your hand and was screaming.
Speaker 1: That was a different No, He's just that was a
Speaker 1: different flight when the turbulence was really bad. I hate
Speaker 1: to fly, I really hate to fly, and apparently so
Speaker 1: did this man because he just kept grabbing my hand.
Speaker 2: Total stranger.
Speaker 1: We hadn't spoken to each other the entire flight, and
Speaker 1: then when I looked at him with a quizzical look
Speaker 1: in my face, he said, I'm just gonna hold your
Speaker 1: hand as a statement of intent.
Speaker 2: Is that happens to you, Yeah, it really is. Yeah. No,
Speaker 2: I don't know, man. I mean, like, I try not
Speaker 2: to read into shit like that because that'll make you
Speaker 2: go insane.
Speaker 1: You know. I think I think it's his atheism peeking through,
Speaker 1: he said to the av club. I'm not a fatalist.
Speaker 1: I'm not a religious person. What I felt more than
Speaker 1: anything else was gratitude towards my travel agent for screwing
Speaker 1: up my itinerary. It didn't change my perspective on what
Speaker 1: I do or anything like that. I couldn't really let it.
Speaker 1: If anything, I started drinking more, which, speaking of which
Speaker 1: I thought, I read he was hungover and that was
Speaker 1: why he was running late and missing the flight. But
Speaker 1: I guess two things can be true at the same time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. But no, I told you.
Speaker 1: My grandmother very very Catholic, so she would kind of
Speaker 1: try to reject anything that sort of smacked of the occult.
Speaker 1: But she would claim that she would have these these
Speaker 1: kind of psychic visions or dreams and she had a dream.
Speaker 1: So the night before her oldest daughter was supposed to
Speaker 1: go with friends on.
Speaker 2: A college to Oh you told me this story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well they were going to go on a college
Speaker 1: tour and with friends, and the night before my grandmother
Speaker 1: had a dream of Jesus on the horseback riding up
Speaker 1: to her and shaking his head and somehow intimato, don't
Speaker 1: let She somehow took this to mean that she shouldn't
Speaker 1: let her daughter go on this trip. And so the
Speaker 1: next morning, when like my aunt or daughter was about
Speaker 1: to leave, she's like, no, you can't go. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I just have a really bad feeling. And my aunt
Speaker 1: was all pissed off and went storming off to her room.
Speaker 1: And then later that day, the car that her friends
Speaker 1: were driving in was hit by a semi on a
Speaker 1: bridge and went off the bridge and everybody in the car.
Speaker 1: I don't know if they drowned or died a blunt
Speaker 1: force impact or what, but they all died.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I've had a few instances of my life where those
Speaker 1: things that you know, kind of can't be explained that
Speaker 1: I don't I don't have strong feelings on what was
Speaker 1: at play. But I have to admit that it was weird,
Speaker 1: and I find this weird. I find it weird that
Speaker 1: narrowly miss.
Speaker 2: You're perfectly You're perfectly entitled to.
Speaker 1: But you know what, it wasn't my experience to have,
Speaker 1: So Seth can feel about it anyway he wants.
Speaker 2: That's right, right, that's right. I'm just reminded of the
Speaker 2: one Anthony Gizelnick joke that I liked, which was, you know,
Speaker 2: my mother was actually supposed to be on one of
Speaker 2: the flights for nine to eleven. I think, yeah, to
Speaker 2: delay it's a delayed burn, which is one of the
Speaker 2: things I like about it. Am I talking to you?
Speaker 2: Talkingou what's going on?
Speaker 1: Yeah? But what's interesting about Seth macfarlan and nine to
Speaker 1: eleven other than this flight thing, was that Family Guy
Speaker 1: had aired a gag about Osama bin Lauden two years
Speaker 1: before the nine to eleven attacks, which I had no
Speaker 1: idea who Osama bin Laden was before September eleven, two
Speaker 1: thousand and one. So that's shocking to me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, you're about to explain what
Speaker 2: what I wrote, So do that you think it's a joke.
Speaker 1: In the first of Family Guys tributes to the Bing
Speaker 1: Crosby Bob Hope Road to Blank series, in which they
Speaker 1: joke about Osama bin Laden distracting airport security by singing
Speaker 1: I hope I get it from a chorus line. That
Speaker 1: episode was broadcast in May two thousand as part of
Speaker 1: the show's second season. I can't believe, like it's just
Speaker 1: such a weird target for.
Speaker 2: It is it is, But you know, because I am
Speaker 2: having disease, I went the extra mile and figured out
Speaker 2: why exactly, Oh.
Speaker 1: Tell us, tell us, I would love to know why.
Speaker 2: So Family Guy is on a ten to fourteen month
Speaker 2: production schedule, meaning that for a joke to air in
Speaker 2: a May two thousand episode. I think this gag would
Speaker 2: have originated when the FBI added bin Laden to the
Speaker 2: ten most Wanted Fugitives list. They did that because of
Speaker 2: his involvement in both the nineteen ninety three World Trade
Speaker 2: Center bombing and the August ninety ninety eight bombings of
Speaker 2: US embassies in East Africa, but this happened before bin
Speaker 2: Lawden's attack on the USS coal which ramped up his
Speaker 2: notoriety in the United States, particularly that happened in October
Speaker 2: of two thousand, so a little over four months after
Speaker 2: this episode aired. So Seth MacFarland had clocked Bin Laden
Speaker 2: from before Bush, did you've made it there before I did?
Speaker 2: I was going to say, Seth MacFarland had been Laden
Speaker 2: on his radar long before Norad did, and then before
Speaker 2: being turned off by George W. Bush. Yours was better? Well,
Speaker 2: that was more succinct. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I know we could accused of patenting ourselves on the
Speaker 1: back and laughing at our own jokes, but folks, if
Speaker 1: we can't amuse ourselves. Folks, we're doing this in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: We have to laugh at each other otherwise, otherwise what
Speaker 1: do we have. If we were doing this on stage,
Speaker 1: we would probably laugh less at each other because we've
Speaker 1: got the crowd out there that gives us that feedback
Speaker 1: We need to have feedback to, like play off of,
Speaker 1: or else we're just reading. Yeah. So this gag was
Speaker 1: included in the episode when it was aired pre nine eleven,
Speaker 1: but obviously in the wake of the attacks, it was
Speaker 1: cut from re airings and also from the DVD. MacFarland
Speaker 1: told IGN in two thousand and three, the more I
Speaker 1: feel this question, the more I feel like it should
Speaker 1: have been left in the joke. My argument was, well, look,
Speaker 1: I missed that flight by ten minutes, and I'm okay
Speaker 1: with putting it on. It's an interesting piece of entertainment history,
Speaker 1: and it was made two years before nine to eleven. McFarland, however,
Speaker 1: did not support the joke remaining on air after the
Speaker 1: nine to eleven attacks. He said that episode reaired or
Speaker 1: was supposed to re air, not too long after September eleventh,
Speaker 1: and in that context, I fully supported them cutting that
Speaker 1: joke out. It would be suicide to air that, especially
Speaker 1: for people who hadn't seen the first airing and didn't
Speaker 1: know that it was an old joke from years earlier.
Speaker 1: They would think that we made it the joke after
Speaker 1: September eleventh, and that would have just been disastrous. This
Speaker 1: isn't the only time that the show has predicted in
Speaker 1: quote something. A two thousand and nine episode joked about
Speaker 1: Bruce Jenner's vagina, six years before Jenner announced their transition
Speaker 1: to Caitlin. What is the context.
Speaker 2: I don't know, and I don't want to know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: but just they made a joke about Bruce Jenner's vagina
Speaker 2: and then one day she got one, and she's very
Speaker 2: brave for it, despite still being like a southern California Republican.
Speaker 2: Were you people when that Vanity fair cover came out? No,
Speaker 2: it was a couple of years before. Oh man, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that was like a bomb went off in the office.
Speaker 1: One thing that threw a wrinkle into Family Guy's equal
Speaker 1: opportunity offenders stance was Disney's acquisition of twentieth Century Fox
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen show on Our richa pel Toil the
Speaker 1: Hollywood Reporter that Disney owns so many properties that I
Speaker 1: will find myself making legal arguments that I know are
Speaker 1: winners about parody and why we can get away with
Speaker 1: certain things. But then the question becomes, well, that may
Speaker 1: be rich, but Marvel doesn't want to see its character
Speaker 1: portrayed in this light. And I've sometimes said, well what
Speaker 1: if we just air it and see what happens, and
Speaker 1: they'll answer, no, that's not how we work.
Speaker 2: Finally, as those of you on TikTok and those of
Speaker 2: you who get your TikTok content via Twitter or Instagram
Speaker 2: may know, Family Guy has had a startling second life online. Jordan.
Speaker 2: I mean, my fourteenth year of professional writing was this year.
Speaker 2: I don't know where you're at But I don't really
Speaker 2: recall Family Guy being huge in like meme culture in
Speaker 2: like the early days, like twenty twelve, thirteen, twenty fourteen.
Speaker 2: I don't remember it being part of the like meme
Speaker 2: ecosystem at that time. I guess I agree with you.
Speaker 2: That was early days, and most a lot of it
Speaker 2: was still just like you know, bad luck Brian or
Speaker 2: like success Toddler, like clenched fizz Toddler. Like. It was
Speaker 2: that more than people like trying to remix pop cultural stuff.
Speaker 2: But man, this TikTok stuff is really out there and
Speaker 2: I'm looking forward to explaining it to you. But give
Speaker 2: us a little background. First.
Speaker 1: Family Guy's online profile was raised considerably after November twenty fourth,
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen, when The Family Guy killed off Brian. Fans
Speaker 1: of the show responded to Brian's death with calls to
Speaker 1: bring the character back alive bring him back Alive, including
Speaker 1: a change dot org petition titled Seth MacFarlane and Fox
Speaker 1: Broadcasting Company Bring Brian Griffin Back to Family Guy, and
Speaker 1: a Facebook petition named Petition to Get Brian Griffin Back,
Speaker 1: and a similar protest that took place on Twitter under
Speaker 1: the hashtag bring back Brian.
Speaker 2: It's like hundreds of thousands of people, by the.
Speaker 1: Way, I mean, they all must have known that this
Speaker 1: was no. Three weeks later the show ret conned it
Speaker 1: or fixed it. I'd never heard that word.
Speaker 2: Oh really, no, oh man, redcn is. I think it
Speaker 2: first came out of comics because they're always just bringing
Speaker 2: people back by some mean or another, but really crossed over.
Speaker 2: I think more popular culture when like with like all
Speaker 2: of these franchises and recasting actors and like Marvel stuff
Speaker 2: where they're like, oh, yeah, that guy we like set
Speaker 2: up to be a way bigger deal in that early
Speaker 2: movie that we haven't followed through on it anyway, Like
Speaker 2: turns out he went back to his home planet and died.
Speaker 2: It's so yeah, retroactive continuity, redcarm okay.
Speaker 1: Perhaps obviously given the lead time of the show's production,
Speaker 1: McFarlane tweeted that the writers had never intended to kill
Speaker 1: off Brian permanently. He would say that the plot was
Speaker 1: intended to remind viewers to never take those you love
Speaker 1: for granted, because they can be gone in a flash.
Speaker 2: How did Brian die again? Hit back car? Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: had he come back? I didn't watch these I was
Speaker 2: not watching the show by this point, but I read
Speaker 2: the Wikipedia. Stewie finds a version of himself with a
Speaker 2: time machine and forces that version of himself to go
Speaker 2: back and time. I'm in save Brian, Okay, all out?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't realize this until researching this episode. William H.
Speaker 1: Macy was initially floated as the voice of Brian, but
Speaker 1: he was turned down because this was you know, in
Speaker 1: the early days. They had but fifty thousand dollars to
Speaker 1: make an episode in one room, and they didn't have
Speaker 1: the budget seth MacFarland was getting his sister to voice Meg,
Speaker 1: and he was doing all the rest of the voices.
Speaker 1: McFarlan later, that's a great quote, it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: McFarland later said, what kind of an arrogant must I
Speaker 1: have been to look at this great actor and say
Speaker 1: I think I can do this better?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean that was a common tactic with shows
Speaker 2: around this area. Like, you know, they cast Danny DeVito
Speaker 2: in the in the second season of It's Always Sunny
Speaker 2: because they wanted to bring in a celebrity to anchor
Speaker 2: the show. They knew it was good and wanted to
Speaker 2: keep it up, but they were like, you need a
Speaker 2: recognizable face. In here, a number of standalone gags became
Speaker 2: enduring meme templates that people still use as well. If
Speaker 2: you're on Twitter, you'll see the Peppers Farm remembers one
Speaker 2: the cutaway gag in which has a segment on local
Speaker 2: news called what really grinds My gears? I remember that
Speaker 2: the phrase I need an adult, which actually dates back
Speaker 2: to like these anti child abuse PSAs in the eighties.
Speaker 2: That's certainly where McFarlane remembered them from, but it was
Speaker 2: resurrected by the show early in like the year two
Speaker 2: thousand and also, Damn Nature, You Scary. Apparently, Google interest
Speaker 2: in the show peaked between October two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: and March two thousand and nine. This is interesting it
Speaker 2: coincides with the show's seventh season, which featured holdover episodes
Speaker 2: from the sixth season, which was cut short due to
Speaker 2: the two thousand and seven two thousand and eight Writers
Speaker 2: Guild of America strike. Although Fox aired episodes in defiance
Speaker 2: of Seth MacFarlane, which he got very mad about. That
Speaker 2: season also included an episode that inspired the Venezuelan government
Speaker 2: to ban Family Guy for twenty is the name of
Speaker 2: the episode in which Brian attempts to legalize pot in Cohog.
Speaker 1: That's the one where they do like a stoner version
Speaker 1: of the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang song me Ol Bamboo
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly.
Speaker 2: Sounds about right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: As a result of that episode, High Times the esteemed
Speaker 1: marijuana publication stowed upon Brian Griffin. It's Stoner of the
Speaker 1: Year title in two thousand and nine. Anyway, the show
Speaker 1: is also banned in Indonesia, Vietnam, Iraq, Egypt, Taiwan, South Korea,
Speaker 1: South Africa, and Malaysia.
Speaker 2: South Korea.
Speaker 1: Actually that surprises me, Iraq not so much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean it's weird considering I think, like I've
Speaker 2: definitely seen like Korean people rolling around with really cool
Speaker 2: outfits with like Peter Griffin on them.
Speaker 1: So isn't it animated there too? Oh?
Speaker 2: I mean so much stuff is yeah over there because
Speaker 2: it's non union jobs. What was I talking about? Oh? Yeah?
Speaker 2: But this is interesting though, because I think it peaked
Speaker 2: in search Oni in between October two thousand and eight
Speaker 2: and March two thousand and nine. Jordan, you used to
Speaker 2: work for Celebrity Rag like I did. What is that season? Oh?
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a ward show season.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So the seventh season was nominated for a Primetime
Speaker 2: Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series that year, making Family
Speaker 2: Guy the first animated series to be nominated in that
Speaker 2: category since The Flintstones in nineteen sixty one in one,
Speaker 2: and it has since won eight more Primetime enemy.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: But yeah, I mean that makes sense why people would
Speaker 2: be looking for it during award show season, being like, Wow,
Speaker 2: did this really break this record? Blah blah blah blah blah. Anyway,
Speaker 2: finally we're getting into TikTok, so the show's current prominence
Speaker 2: as part of it, or at least where I've been seeing.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's still used on TikTok, but
Speaker 2: where I started seeing its surface on TikTok was in
Speaker 2: like twenty two to twenty three, and that is indeed
Speaker 2: when it started. It's going to get deep and weird,
Speaker 2: so bear with me. A lot of this has to
Speaker 2: do with copyright strikes, like how people would avoid people
Speaker 2: would put post clips like show clip roundups to YouTube,
Speaker 2: will like insert random audio at points or different non
Speaker 2: sequarters to throw off the copyright bots. But beginning in
Speaker 2: mid November twenty twenty two, Family Guy clip channels on
Speaker 2: TikTok began using a series of videos that showed a
Speaker 2: man putting various objects, including cigarettes and carrots, into a
Speaker 2: metal pipe as part of the repair process, and while
Speaker 2: under or over in a split screen format family Guy clips,
Speaker 2: so you're getting this bizarre two screen rendering of something
Speaker 2: completely unrelated and family Guy clips at the bottom. So
Speaker 2: there were least three prominent family Guy accounts that did this.
Speaker 2: The first posting was on November ninth, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 2: It got over twenty six thousand plays in a month.
Speaker 2: And then because the popularity of those search terms of
Speaker 2: family Guy pipe, TikTok's algorithm actually glitched, so it wound
Speaker 2: up suggesting the phrase family Guy pipeline incident, which is
Speaker 2: a corruption of those search terms in everybody's related search
Speaker 2: bars and comments. So everybody started being like, what the
Speaker 2: hell is the family Guy pipeline incident? And they start
Speaker 2: searching for it more so it becomes this whole or
Speaker 2: boros of like a predictive search algorithm glitches, and then
Speaker 2: more people start searching for that term than the original
Speaker 2: search thing, so that I think started it. And then
Speaker 2: thanks to the helpful folks over it know your meme.
Speaker 2: We can actually trace the progression of Family Guy posting
Speaker 2: over the next two month, as like you would track
Speaker 2: a spore, fungus or something. So November twentieth, twenty twenty two,
Speaker 2: TikToker Popperball nine posted a Family Guy clip video featuring
Speaker 2: multiple layers of other videos layered across it to deliberately
Speaker 2: do a kind of meta reference to how people evade
Speaker 2: the platform's copyright claim system, and then over the course
Speaker 2: of twenty two days, that video got three point nine
Speaker 2: million plays. December second, twenty twenty two, another TikTok poster
Speaker 2: hosted the first known Family Guy jump scare video, which
Speaker 2: is it features just normal clips from the show and
Speaker 2: then all of the sudden, like a scary face will
Speaker 2: come out and scream at you and the volume will distort.
Speaker 2: Although they did one that just said George Bush did
Speaker 2: nine to eleven that I really liked, and then from
Speaker 2: there that mutates into what we call overstimulation content or
Speaker 2: a subset of ADHD posting. This is a trend with
Speaker 2: like these poor zoomers whose brains have been fried from
Speaker 2: jump with phones. They post the same split screen format.
Speaker 2: It'll either be a screen recording of their phone where
Speaker 2: Family Guy is playing on one half of it, and
Speaker 2: then they're playing Subway Surfers or another like low cost
Speaker 2: mobile game in the other half of the phone. So
Speaker 2: they either post screen recordings of that or they post
Speaker 2: pictures of themselves doing that while watching TV. And this
Speaker 2: is the craziest thing. Subway Surfers became like the mobile
Speaker 2: game of choice for this meme structure which I remember
Speaker 2: playing in like twenty eleven. That became popular because there
Speaker 2: was a guy who was using TikTok's text to voice
Speaker 2: feature to narrate content from Reddit and to avoid copyright
Speaker 2: strikes from Reddit or seo creeping, he posted it in
Speaker 2: the split screen format while Subway Surfers or Minecraft played
Speaker 2: in the background. So this guy is using Subway Surfers
Speaker 2: to duck Reddit copyright or Reddit strike claims by spamming
Speaker 2: Subway Surfers in the background. And then the same guy
Speaker 2: sees how popular Family Guy is becoming and becomes one
Speaker 2: of the original accounts posting Family Guy Subway Surfer clips
Speaker 2: in December of twenty twenty two, so that from mid
Speaker 2: November to December twenty twenty two, this thing has already
Speaker 2: become a trend, a trend people are tweaking, and a
Speaker 2: trend people have now built on by showing how they're
Speaker 2: unable to pay attention to anything. Then I mean, this
Speaker 2: is this is what I find. So it's fascinating from
Speaker 2: an academic standpoint because it's just like it's like the
Speaker 2: study of culture. It's like how this stuff or viruses,
Speaker 2: like how this stuff would you know, move through these
Speaker 2: move through these ecosystems. So I don't know if you've
Speaker 2: seen the boring or long as hell phrase like this
Speaker 2: move this funeral, boring, boring a hell? Have you seen that?
Speaker 1: I am like a new born child hearing all.
Speaker 2: This, So like a ton of TikTok slang, which I
Speaker 2: don't think we should let these kids get away with.
Speaker 2: Boring ass is taken from aa VE or African American
Speaker 2: vernacular English, Like half of TikTok slang is stolen from
Speaker 2: Black people used to say it's supposed to sound like
Speaker 2: ass with like a stereotypical quote black scent. So instead
Speaker 2: of seeing boring ass that they avoid the curse by
Speaker 2: saying boring as. So you can find instances of it
Speaker 2: being called but people say boring at and like Twitter
Speaker 2: in two thousand and nine, but the zoomers really glommed
Speaker 2: onto it in early twenty twenty two and they started
Speaker 2: calling things goofy ah. And then when this whole Family
Speaker 2: Guy thing is reaching on TikTok is reaching critical mass,
Speaker 2: there's someone just posted an instagram of a guy watching
Speaker 2: Family Guy on his phone in a theater that was
Speaker 2: playing Avatar The Way of Water, with the text movie
Speaker 2: long a Hell.
Speaker 1: That's medium funny it was.
Speaker 2: And that one was actually reposted on Facebook pretty quickly thereafter,
Speaker 2: and that contributed to this massive combo of like x
Speaker 2: long or boring a Hell where people were like at
Speaker 2: funerals watching Family Guy or childbirths, like watching family ey
Speaker 2: clips on their phone and posting it saying like this
Speaker 2: funeral boring a hell. Like you know, eventually there's all.
Speaker 2: It turns back around and spreads to the wider Internet
Speaker 2: where people who get paid to write about this stuff,
Speaker 2: which if you were still doing that, congratulations on your
Speaker 2: golden parachute from Slate dot com. Ah. This whole phenom
Speaker 2: of overlapping multiple screens, over stimulating content, and microscopic attention
Speaker 2: spans was termed sludge content or what wed in the
Speaker 2: good old days, we call it posting. I think they
Speaker 2: still call it that, But it's this idea that like,
Speaker 2: there's so much low grade content circulating on social media
Speaker 2: and any screen that by like combining as much of
Speaker 2: it as you can into one thing, you're creating new
Speaker 2: sludge content. So you'll see these like videos where people
Speaker 2: have overlaid like multiple different clips from different shows or movies,
Speaker 2: something else is going on in the background, and then
Speaker 2: a bunch of people wrote these thin pieces about why
Speaker 2: it was bad. But this is kind of insightful, and
Speaker 2: this is what I think is interesting. MacFarlane, Seth Creed
Speaker 2: and Rich Apple were doing that La Times group interview
Speaker 2: about the show, and they were asked about the TikTok popularity,
Speaker 2: and McFarlane said, it almost seems as if the show
Speaker 2: was made for TikTok, the cutaways that were in some
Speaker 2: cases maligned, and then he says, but these are the
Speaker 2: hardest things to do, These are the hardest things to write.
Speaker 2: To go in and essentially write a Gary Larson farside panel,
Speaker 2: how many times a day that had to have a beginning, middle,
Speaker 2: and end in the space of anywhere from three seconds
Speaker 2: to fifteen to twenty seconds, and that was something we
Speaker 2: were doing in nineteen ninety nine, in the early two thousands.
Speaker 2: Now they just fit in like a glove. I think
Speaker 2: in many ways, TikTok validated the structure of the show,
Speaker 2: which again leads me to believe he is some kind
Speaker 2: of He's like from the future or something man, because
Speaker 2: that makes so much sense to me that like stuff
Speaker 2: that they like, ADHD, cutaway gag, random stuff that they
Speaker 2: were constantly being shown basically predicted modern social media.
Speaker 1: I mean, here's something that I don't necessarily I really believe,
Speaker 1: and I haven't thought enough about it to really make
Speaker 1: this client.
Speaker 2: But how much what we do on this show, maybe how.
Speaker 1: Much of it is that Family Guy's humor and structure
Speaker 1: of those cutaway jokes just primed people's brains to create
Speaker 1: content in that way, and that led those sort of
Speaker 1: short form video platforms to gain popularity.
Speaker 2: I think a lot of these kids were solely coming
Speaker 2: at this like they discovered Family Guy. I'm not I
Speaker 2: obviously don't know. I haven't interviewed any of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the courts won't let you.
Speaker 2: Also good, you know. The novelty was that it was
Speaker 2: like an old animated show that like they probably were
Speaker 2: not that familiar with that suddenly became this vehicle for
Speaker 2: all of this extraneous, weird content that they could do.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I, like I said earlier, like thinking
Speaker 2: about this and putting credence in some of the things
Speaker 2: that he said about it, I'm really like he may
Speaker 2: have predicted like the entirety of post nine to eleven
Speaker 2: culture in a bad way. I want to stress all
Speaker 2: right now I'm losing my voice, so we gotta wrap
Speaker 2: this up because I have I do have an impression
Speaker 2: I want to do for you, Okay.
Speaker 1: Family Guy was the cornerstone from which the Seth MacFarlane
Speaker 1: empire was launched. He created American Dad off the successive
Speaker 1: Family Guy spun off The Cleveland Show, and used a
Speaker 1: barely modified version of Peter Griffin's voice as the surprisingly
Speaker 1: successful Mark Wohlberg Because a foul mouth and a debauch
Speaker 1: Teddy Bear movie. Ted McFarlane also used the show's success
Speaker 1: as a springboard for his own musical aspirations, singing big
Speaker 1: band cruider music, hell yeah, which you know who among us?
Speaker 2: Really? Yeah? Honestly.
Speaker 1: The site Fast Company did some quick back of the
Speaker 1: Napkin math of McFarland's Empire in two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: and estimated it was worth or at least has generated
Speaker 1: about two billion dollars. That's billion with a bee. And
Speaker 1: this was before Ted in its sequel and apparently prequel
Speaker 1: streaming show launched that year.
Speaker 2: Now it came out last year.
Speaker 1: Oh came out last year?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Oh wow?
Speaker 2: Okay, so Ted still has legs. Who knew?
Speaker 1: I didn't?
Speaker 2: I didn't. Good straight man answer to that. In the
Speaker 2: La Times piece that I mentioned, McFarlane, who is now
Speaker 2: only a voice actor on the show, as I mentioned,
Speaker 2: was questioned about how long the show would continue. He answered,
Speaker 2: at this point, I don't see a good reason to stop.
Speaker 2: People still love it makes people happy, and it funds
Speaker 2: some good causes. It's a lot of extraneous cash that
Speaker 2: you can donate to Rainforest Trust, and you can still
Speaker 2: go out to dinner that night. There was a time
Speaker 2: when I thought it's time to wrap it up. At
Speaker 2: this point, we've reached escape velocity. I don't know that
Speaker 2: there's any reason to stop at this point unless people
Speaker 2: get sick of it, unless the numbers show that people
Speaker 2: are just we don't care about family Guy anymore. But
Speaker 2: that hasn't happened yet.
Speaker 1: Oh souls take on his creation, which honestly kind of
Speaker 1: seems about right.
Speaker 2: Well, I got a questioned for you, Jordan, Yes, how you?
Speaker 2: How you coming on? That podcast? Will going on for
Speaker 2: next week? Hmm? Got a couple of got a couple
Speaker 2: of pages and a.
Speaker 3: Google doc for mem nice little, nice little three act
Speaker 3: structure for a narrative podcast to do. Working on the
Speaker 3: the big podcast, maybe the Beach Boys. I know you've
Speaker 3: been working on that one for three years. Gotta we
Speaker 3: got a compelling main character protagonist, gonna be some obstacles
Speaker 3: for him to overcome.
Speaker 2: Whose story boring there? Been working on that for quite
Speaker 2: some time. We aren't talking about that three years ago.
Speaker 2: Been working on that whole the whole time.
Speaker 3: Nice little nonive beginning, middle, and then some friends become enemies,
Speaker 3: some memories.
Speaker 2: We got friends at the end of the day. Your
Speaker 2: main character is richer for the experience. Yeah, I look
Speaker 2: forward to listening to it.
Speaker 1: The best part was it got so high pitched that
Speaker 1: I could no longer hear it through that.
Speaker 2: This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hagel.
Speaker 1: And I'm Jordan run tag. We'll catch you next Time.
Speaker 2: Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's
Speaker 2: executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.
Speaker 1: The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.
Speaker 2: The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog
Speaker 2: and Alex Heigel.
Speaker 1: With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
Speaker 2: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
Speaker 2: us a review.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows